Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

astride

UK/əˈstɹaɪ̯d/US/əˈstɹaɪ̯d/
adverbC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,183 of 15,258neutral

Astride means with one leg on each side of something. Sit astride the horse, astride a bench, stand astride it.

It works figuratively of anything spanning two things — a city astride a river, a company astride two markets. Riding astride rather than side-saddle was thought improper for women until the twentieth century. Note the a- prefix, as in aboard and ashore.

Definitions of astride

  1. 1adverbastrideWith one leg on each side of something.C1

    “The boy sat astride the fence, swinging his legs and watching the cows.”

astride is a position.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *strīdaną

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *strīdan

  3. Old English

    strīdan — stride

  4. Middle English

    striden

  5. English

    stride

  6. English, today

    astride

From a- + stride. stride comes from Middle English striden, from Old English strīdan (“stride”), from Proto-West Germanic strīdan, from Proto-Germanic strīdaną. Cognate with Low German striden (“to fight, to stride”), Dutch strijden (“to fight”), German streiten (“to fight, to quarrel”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

astride in the wild

  • The blue and white wavy bands represent the Pacific Ocean, which surrounds Kiribati, and the sun refers to Kiribati's position astride the Equator.

    Flag of Kiribati

  • Dinagat Island partly encloses the gulf to the southeast, and the small Homonhon Island and Suluan Island, sit astride the eastern entrance to the Gulf.

    Leyte Gulf

  • The satellite crater Anuchin L lies astride the southern rim, but the otherwise the outer wall is not significantly incised.

    Anuchin (crater)

  • The suburb lies astride the M1 motorway, between the major nodes of Johannesburg CBD to the south and Rosebank to the north.

    Killarney, Johannesburg

  • The town is surrounded by the Long Range Mountains and sits astride the Humber River.

    Steady Brook

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the strīdan family

stride

astride — used about once every 20,553 pages · #13,183 · point at the bar for the others

  • bestride