Past Tense of “strike”
The past tense of strike is struck; the past participle is struck (also stricken in adjectival use).
Why “strike” behaves this way
"Strike" comes from Old English "strican," which originally meant "to stroke, rub, or go, move" rather than "to hit" — the sense of violent impact developed later, in Middle English, from the more neutral idea of a hand or blade moving swiftly across something. As a strong verb it took the ablaut pattern that gave Old and Middle English "strike/strook/stricken," with "strook" surviving in dialect and older literature well into the early modern period before "struck" leveled the two slots into one shared form.
The older participle "stricken" never fully disappeared — it survives today as a frozen adjective in compounds like "grief-stricken," "poverty-stricken," and "terror-stricken," and on its own in phrases like "stricken from the record." In every one of these uses, "stricken" describes a state someone has been struck into, not an action someone performed, which is why modern English keeps two distinct past-participle forms of the same verb doing two different jobs: "struck" for the ordinary verbal participle ("the clock has struck twelve") and "stricken" for the adjectival leftover.
The common confusion
The genuine confusion is knowing when "stricken" is still allowed: it only survives in a closed set of fixed adjectival compounds and legal/formal phrasing ("stricken from the record"), never as an ordinary verbal participle — "the ship has stricken the rocks" is wrong; "the ship has struck the rocks" is correct, because that's an active verb use, not a frozen adjective.
How it's actually used
"Strike" carries an unusually wide spread of meanings that share only a loose family resemblance: physical impact (strike a match), labor action (workers strike), sudden realization (it struck me), and athletic terminology (strike three) all trace back to the same root sense of a swift, decisive movement. In labor contexts specifically, "strike" functions as both a verb and a noun with identical spelling, which occasionally creates ambiguity in headlines ("Workers strike deal" can misread as a labor action rather than a negotiated agreement). Musicians also "strike up" a tune or a conversation, a phrase where the verb signals a sudden, deliberate beginning rather than any kind of blow, and coin collectors use "strike" as a noun for a single press of a coin die, a specialized numismatic sense borrowed directly from the verb's action of stamping metal.
Across the tense system
In the perfect tenses, "has struck" and "has been struck" mark two different grammatical roles for the same participle — active ("the bell has struck") versus passive ("she has been struck by the news") — while "stricken" never appears in either perfect construction at all; it only ever modifies a noun directly, which is the clearest test for telling the adjective from the verb form. Baseball preserves "struck out" as a fixed idiomatic result distinct from the literal sense of hitting something, describing a batter’s failure to hit the ball after three strikes.
Common real mistakes
Writers occasionally reach for "stricken" in ordinary verbal contexts where "struck" is required ("the plane was stricken by lightning" instead of the correct "struck by lightning"), a hypercorrection that treats the more formal-sounding word as always more correct. The reverse error, using bare "struck" where the fixed adjectival phrase calls for "stricken" ("a struck family," instead of "a grief-stricken family"), is rarer but shows up when writers haven't registered that these compounds are fixed rather than freely substitutable.
Examples
- The storm struck the coast just after midnight.
- She has struck a deal with the new supplier.
- He was struck by how quiet the house felt.
- They struck camp before sunrise.
- The clock had struck ten by the time we arrived.
- Workers are threatening to strike next month.
- It strikes me as an odd coincidence.
- The judge ordered the comment stricken from the record.
Memory trick
Keep "struck" as your default for every ordinary use of the verb — hitting, striking a deal, a clock striking the hour — and reserve "stricken" strictly for compound adjectives describing a state, like "panic-stricken." If you can't hyphenate it to a noun of affliction, it isn't a "stricken" situation.