Strike's Past Tense Is Struck — Here's Where Stricken Still Survives

You're doing dictation practice on a news clip. The speaker says a sentence, you type "It stuck me as odd," and the red underline marks exactly one letter wrong. The real sentence was "It struck me as odd." Just one /r/ sound wedged between /st/ and the vowel, and it's small enough to disappear. Quick answer first: the simple past of strike is struck, and the past participle is also struck. As for the form stricken that you may have seen somewhere, it does still exist, but it only survives in a handful of fixed phrases.

Strike has two hard spots. First is meaning: strike is one of the most wide-ranging verbs in English, covering hit, toll a bell, go on strike, strike a match, suddenly occur to someone, and strike oil. A sentence with struck that you default-translate as "hit" will, most of the time, be a mistranslation. Second is sound: struck and stuck differ by exactly one consonant sitting inside a three-consonant cluster, and that opening cluster is something Vietnamese doesn't have.

This article walks through the whole chain: the form table of strike, the verb group it belongs to, where stricken still survives and why, the six main meanings of struck along with cues for telling them apart, common phrases, and — the longest section — how struck actually sounds when native speakers say it at normal speed.

• The form table of strike, and why it falls into the /ʌ/ group
• When to use struck, when to use stricken
• Hearing struck in real speech
• Common phrases with struck
• Mistakes Vietnamese learners commonly make with strike
• Quick exercises
• Frequently asked questions

The form table of strike, and why it falls into the /ʌ/ group

Five forms. The pronunciation column follows American speech, with British differences noted where they're clearly different.

Strike belongs to the group of verbs that shift their vowel to /ʌ/ and keep a single form for both V2 and V3. Fellow members of this group include stick with stuck, dig with dug, hang with hung, sting with stung, swing with swung, cling with clung, win with won. What they share is that you only need to memorize one form instead of two, and the new vowel is always short and sits in the middle of the mouth.

Here's the thing worth noting: strike wasn't always in that group. In Old English, strike belonged to the same family as write, ride, drive — the kind with three distinct forms, whose participle ends in -en. The trace of that old family is exactly stricken, the original participle. Later on, the form struck encroached on both the V2 and V3 slots, and stricken got pushed to the margins.

Pushed to the margins, but not dead. Stricken survives in exactly the spots where language tends to freeze solid: compound phrases before a noun, and administrative formulas. Grief-stricken, panic-stricken, poverty-stricken, horror-stricken. In American courtrooms, a line struck from the record is "stricken from the record." In maritime news, a ship disabled at sea is "a stricken vessel." Outside those pockets, stricken no longer moves freely.

There's a practical consequence for learners here. You'll come across stricken fairly often in journalism, and after reading it a few times it's easy to get the feeling it's a normal, usable participle. It isn't. "The clock has stricken two" is wrong. "The clock has struck two" is what people actually write.

If you're reviewing this whole group, three close relatives are worth reading alongside this one. The past tense of stick is worth checking first, since stuck differs from struck by exactly one sound, and that pair gets mixed up the most by ear. The past tense of dig follows the same /ʌ/-shift pattern but starts with only one consonant, so it shows you that the hard part of strike lies in the cluster, not the vowel. The past tense of hang is interesting because it has two past forms carrying two different meanings — something strike doesn't have. And if you want to organize the whole system, the article English grammar puts tenses and verbs in their proper places.

When to use struck, when to use stricken

The simplest rule: struck handles everything a verb needs to do, while stricken only ever stands in front of a noun or inside a set formula, functioning almost like an adjective. If your sentence needs a verb in the past tense, or a participle following have, has, had, was, were — that's struck.

Grammar done — now the part that really trips people up with strike: meaning. This is an unusually wide-ranging verb, and the tricky part is that its meanings share almost no common imagery. The six meanings below cover nearly everything you'll run into, along with cues for telling each one apart.

The third row is the one worth remembering most, because it shows up constantly in spoken English. "It struck me that..." and "It struck me as..." are how native speakers open up an observation, and there's no violence in it at all. "She struck me as competent" means my impression of her was that she was capable. A learner who translates it literally ends up with a completely different sentence.

The fourth row drags along its own word family that's worth learning together: the noun a strike, the phrase on strike, and the verb go on strike. In labor news, these three show up side by side. "The workers went on strike" and "the workers struck" say the same thing, and the first form is far more common in speech.

Hearing struck in real speech

This is the part no verb-conjugation table tells you, and it's also why you mishear struck even when you know it by heart. Struck has just one syllable, but that one syllable packs three consonants at the front and a stop sound at the end — pretty much everything a Vietnamese ear tends to drop.

The cluster /str/ at the start of a word doesn't exist in Vietnamese. Vietnamese doesn't allow two consonants to stick together at the start of a syllable, let alone three. An untrained ear will automatically simplify it, and the most common simplification is dropping the /r/, turning struck into stuck. One more detail: in modern American speech, the /tr/ inside str is usually pronounced close to /tʃ/, so "struck" ends up sounding a bit like "sh-truck." Knowing this ahead of time means you'll stop hunting for a clear /t/ sound next time.

The final /k/ almost never gets released before a consonant. In "struck me," the tongue rises to block at the soft palate and moves straight into /m/, with no burst of sound at all. What you hear comes out as "stru' me," one solid block. Same thing in "struck back," "struck down," "struck twice."

The /k/ only survives when the next word starts with a vowel. "Struck a match" links into "stru-ka match." "Struck oil" becomes "stru-koil." These are the only cases where you'll clearly hear how many sounds are in struck, which is also exactly why they're the easiest ones to catch.

The word "it" in front gets swallowed into "struck." In real speech, "It struck me" isn't three separate words. The final /t/ sound of "it" meets the initial /s/ of "struck" and dissolves right into it, so the sentence comes out as "i-struck-me" in one breath. Learners hear "struck me" but miss the word "it," so they write down a sentence missing its subject.

"Was" and "were" before "struck" shrink into a single beat. "He was struck by a car" in fast speech becomes "he wz struck by a car" — the word "was" is reduced to a very light /wəz/ or even shorter. Miss that part and you write down "he struck by a car," a sentence that's completely wrong in meaning because it turns the victim into the one doing the striking.

"Strikes" and "struck" differ in the vowel, not in the ending. In fast speech, the /ks/ of "strikes" and the /k/ of "struck" both blur together. What actually distinguishes them is /aɪ/ in "strikes" versus /ʌ/ in "struck" — a long diphthong versus a short, clipped vowel. If you're used to relying on word endings to guess, you'll let it slip by; if you're used to listening for the vowel, you'll catch it right away.

The table below lines up three things side by side: the original sentence, how it sounds when spoken quickly, and how learners tend to mis-transcribe it. The middle column follows what the ear hears. The table format above is where you'll find the standard phonetic transcription.

Looking at the third column, the errors fall into three types. The first and most serious is the loss of /r/, turning "struck" into "stuck," which accounts for three of the six lines. This is a consonant-cluster error, and it completely changes the meaning of the sentence: "stuck" means stuck, caught, jammed — nothing to do with hitting or striking. The second type is the loss of an unstressed function word, meaning "was" or "'ve" disappears. The third type is linking the sounds in the wrong place, as in line four where "struck a" gets mistakenly split into "struck up."

In a dictation session on WELE, this exact error-correction sequence plays out specifically with "strike." You hear a sentence, transcribe it as is, and the grading shows that you wrote "stuck" where it should have been "struck." The feedback you get isn't "you haven't memorized the irregular verb table," because you have. The real feedback is "your ear can't separate /str/ from /st/." Those two diagnoses lead to two completely different actions, and only the second one is actually useful.

The fix is just as specific. You listen to that same sentence again a few times, this time paying attention to just one thing: whether there's a small /r/ sound after /st/ or not. A few dozen times like this across different sentences, and your ear starts to tell the pair apart without conscious effort. Re-reading the five-line table at the start of the article produces no change at all, because your eyes have long been able to tell "struck" and "stuck" apart.

If you want to understand why these sounds disappear — and that it's not because your listening is bad — the article on connected speech explains the mechanism of sound-swallowing and linking across a whole sentence. If you want to try it right away, head to the podcast library, where every episode comes with a transcript, so you can check back against every sentence you just transcribed.

Common expressions with struck

"Strike" produces few phrasal verbs but a great many fixed collocations with nouns, and in news as well as work conversations you'll encounter these collocations more often than "strike" used in its literal sense. The thirteen lines below keep the past-tense or participle form, so the written form becomes familiar to you.

The three lines "struck down," "struck off," and "struck out" are worth noting because they're rare cases where "strike" behaves like a true phrasal verb, and three prepositions give three meanings that can't be guessed from the original sense. "Struck down" belongs to the courtroom. "Struck off" belongs to professional bodies — doctors and lawyers who lose their license. "Struck out" has three meanings depending on context, and its "failure" sense originally comes from American baseball.

One more point about structure. "Struck me as" always takes an adjective or a noun describing a type of person, never a clause: "he struck me as honest" or "he struck me as a careful person". But when you want to express a thought that suddenly occurs to you, the structure switches entirely to "it struck me that" plus a full clause.

Mistakes Vietnamese learners often make with strike

Striked. This comes from the habit of treating "-ed" as a universal past-tense switch. "Strike" is never conjugated regularly, in any of its meanings, including the "strike" of a labor strike. "The workers striked" is wrong; it should be "the workers struck," or more commonly, "the workers went on strike."

Did he struck. After "did," the verb goes back to its base form, because "did" already carries the past tense. "Did he strike the ball?" is the correct version. This mistake tends to pop up exactly when you're concentrating hard on remembering that the past tense of "strike" is "struck" — remembering it too well.

Have stricken instead of have struck. "Stricken" looks old-fashioned and formal, so many people assume it's the more standard form. It isn't. Apart from compound expressions before a noun and a few legal formulas, "stricken" can't be used as the participle. "We have stricken an agreement" is wrong; "we have struck an agreement" is correct.

Confusing struck with stuck in writing. The listening error described above has a written version too. "Stuck" is the past tense of "stick," meaning stuck, caught, jammed. "Struck" is the past tense of "strike." "I was stuck in traffic" means I was stuck in traffic. "I was struck in traffic" means I was hit in the middle of the road — a very different sentence. When proofreading, reread every place with "st" and check whether there's an "r" or not.

Using struck instead of hit in everyday sentences. Both mean to hit or strike, but "struck" carries a formal tone, common in news reports, accident reports, and legal documents. In everyday conversation, people say "hit." "A car hit him" is a normal sentence; "a car struck him" sounds like something a reporter would write. Picking the wrong one here isn't a grammar mistake — it just makes your sentence sound like a quote from a news bulletin.

Saying in strike instead of on strike. The fixed collocation is "on strike," with no other preposition possible. "The nurses are on strike" is correct; "the nurses are in strike" is wrong. Alongside it is "go on strike" for talking about when it begins, and "be on strike" for the ongoing state. One more small detail: the word "strike" in baseball and in bowling is this same noun, and the phrase "three strikes" has made its way into both American criminal law and everyday speech.

Quick exercise

Eight sentences — fill in strike, strikes, struck, or stricken. Do the whole set first; save the answer key below for after.

1. The clock ______ midnight just as we arrived.
2. Did the ball ______ the window or the wall?
3. It ______ me that nobody had checked the backup.
4. The court has ______ down the regulation.
5. The poverty-______ region received no aid for months.
6. Lightning rarely ______ the same place twice.
7. They have ______ a deal with the landlord.
8. The drivers ______ for better pay last winter.

Answers: 1. struck. 2. strike. 3. struck. 4. struck. 5. stricken. 6. strikes. 7. struck. 8. struck.

Questions 2 and 6 are worth pausing on. Question 2 has did in front of it, so the verb goes back to its base form, and this is the mistake made most often out of all eight. Question 6 has the word rarely and states a general truth, meaning simple present with a singular subject, so it must be strikes and not struck, even though the sentence sounds like it's telling a story. If you got these two wrong, the section above is worth reading again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the past tense of strike?

The simple past and past participle of strike are both struck. You only have to remember one form for both positions, just like stick with stuck or dig with dug.

Struck or stricken, which one do you use?

Use struck for every verb role. stricken only survives in compound phrases that come before a noun, such as grief-stricken, panic-stricken, poverty-stricken, and in a few legal formulas like stricken from the record. It can't be used as a free-standing participle.

How are struck and stuck different?

stuck is the past tense of stick, meaning stuck, jammed, caught on something. struck is the past tense of strike. The two words differ by only one sound, the /r/ in the initial cluster, so it's very easy to mishear them, and when you do, the meaning of the sentence changes completely.

What does it struck me that mean?

It means I suddenly realized, it occurred to me. There is no sense of hitting or striking here. Native speakers use this phrase to open up an observation, and the variant "it struck me as" goes with an adjective to describe one's impression of someone or something.

Why does struck get heard or written down as stuck?

Because Vietnamese has no three-consonant cluster at the start of a syllable, an ear that isn't used to it will automatically simplify /str/ into /st/, and the /r/ sound drops out. The fix isn't to relearn the rule but to listen to that exact pair over and over, paying attention to just one single point: whether or not there's a small /r/ sound sitting after /st/.

How long does it take to be able to hear initial consonant clusters like /str/?

You can grasp the rule part in one sitting; the ear part depends on your current listening level. The most practical way to measure it is to transcribe a few conversation clips and see how many spots you're still simplifying the cluster in. Before you start practicing, take the listening level test once, then measure again a few weeks later.

You can read through the form table for strike in twenty seconds, and that's the easiest part of this page. The rest, the /r/ that drops out of the middle of a three-sound cluster, and struck carrying six meanings that have nothing to do with each other, only really sinks into your ear once you've missed it while listening and seen where you transcribed it wrong. Pick a short clip and try dictation practice on a passage that has struck in it, then go back to the table at the top of the article and see if it still feels as dry.