Past Tense of “strive”
The past tense of strive is strove; the past participle is striven.
Why “strive” behaves this way
"Strive" is a genuinely unusual case: it entered English from Old French "estriver" (to quarrel or contend), a Romance-language borrowing that should, by all normal patterns, have become a regular English verb like most other French loanwords of its era. Instead, once absorbed into English, it developed a strong, ablaut-style conjugation, strive/strove/striven, entirely by analogy with existing native strong verbs like "drive/drove/driven" and "dive/dove/dived," which it happens to rhyme with closely.
This makes "strive" one of the clearest documented examples in English of a borrowed word acquiring irregular conjugation after the fact rather than arriving already irregular or regularizing over time, the reverse of the far more common pattern — most loanwords either stay regular permanently or, rarely, lose an original irregular pattern from their source language; "strive" instead gained irregularity it never originally had, purely through resemblance to unrelated native verbs. The noun "strife" (conflict or struggle) shares the same French root but took a different path into English, never developing any verb form of its own and staying purely nominal, which is why "strive" and "strife" feel etymologically related but function completely differently in a sentence.
The common confusion
Because "strived" is also listed as an acceptable, fully regular alternative in most dictionaries, writers are sometimes uncertain which form to use, and unlike the more settled "sneaked"/"snuck" split, this alternation isn't strongly tied to region — both British and American English accept "strove"/"striven" and "strived" more or less interchangeably, with "strove"/"striven" slightly favored in more formal or literary registers. A separate confusion arises with the unrelated noun "strife," which some writers mistakenly assume must share a conjugation with "strive" simply because the two words look and sound so similar, when in fact "strife" has no verb form of its own at all.
How it's actually used
"Strive" carries a distinctly elevated, effortful register compared to more neutral synonyms like "try" or "attempt" — it implies sustained, often difficult or noble effort toward a goal, which is part of why it appears so often in mission statements, commencement speeches, and motivational writing, contexts where a plainer verb like "try" would feel too casual for the moment. It almost always takes an infinitive complement ("strive to succeed," "strive to understand") rather than a direct object, a grammatical pattern shared with other aspirational verbs like "aim" and "aspire." It can also take the preposition "for" with a noun object ("strive for excellence," "strive for balance"), a slightly more compact construction that carries the same aspirational weight as the infinitive form.
Across the tense system
In the perfect tense, "has striven" carries a more formal, almost archaic-literary weight than the perfectly acceptable "has strived," and many careful writers choose between the two based purely on the surrounding register of the sentence rather than any hard grammatical rule, treating the choice more like a stylistic register decision than a correctness question. Both forms behave identically in the passive voice, though the passive is genuinely rare for this verb, since "strive" almost always describes a subject's own effort rather than something done to an external object.
Common real mistakes
Strictly speaking, neither form is wrong, since dictionaries list "strove/striven" and "strived" side by side — the real-world slip is inconsistency, drifting between the two within one piece of writing without any stylistic reason to do so. A second, much rarer error is the incorrect blend "strived" used alongside "striven" in the same sentence, mismatching simple past and participle forms from two different competing paradigms. A third error, seen in mission-statement and corporate writing, is overusing "strives to" as a filler phrase to the point of cliché, a pattern common enough that some style guides now specifically flag it as a sign of vague, unspecific corporate language rather than genuine description of effort.
Examples
- She has always strived to improve her craft.
- He strove for perfection in every performance.
- They have striven for years to reform the outdated system.
- The team strived to meet an increasingly difficult deadline.
- She has striven to balance ambition with kindness throughout her career.
- He strove tirelessly against overwhelming odds.
Memory trick
Pair it mentally with "drive/drove/driven," since "strive" borrowed that exact vowel pattern by analogy even though it started life as an unrelated French loanword — but remember that the plain regular "strived" is equally correct in every register if the older pattern ever slips your mind.