Home → Irregular verbs → strive
Past tense of “strive”
🧗 To try very hard to achieve something.
Number 121 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: three separate forms to keep apart. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “strive”
Not “have strove”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have striven, never I have strove. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Do not confuse it with…
Formal and mostly written. In speech people say try hard or push; strove would sound out of place in a conversation.
The participle goes back to the base
strive · strove · striven. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: strive → striven, with strove having nothing to do with it.
Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.
Either way the ending does the work for you. A form ending in -n needs have, has, had or a passive be in front of it; without one it stands alone as the past — He strove to finish first.
- Past participle: She has always striven for perfection.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
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