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stricken

UK/ˈstɹɪkən/US/ˈstɹɪkən/
adjectiveC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,974 of 15,258leans written

Stricken means badly affected by illness, grief or disaster. Grief-stricken, a stricken vessel, panic-stricken.

It is an old past participle of strike, kept alive mainly in compounds — grief-stricken, poverty-stricken, panic-stricken — where the thing that struck comes first. On its own it is formal and belongs to news reports about ships and regions.

Definitions of stricken

  1. 1adjectivestrickenBadly affected by illness, grief or disaster.C1

    “Aid workers brought food and water to the stricken villages after the earthquake.”

stricken is a state.

Where it comes from

An older past participle of strike, from Old English strican, to stroke or move.

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *strikanaz

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *strikan

  3. Old English

    stricen

  4. Middle English

    striken

  5. English, today

    stricken

From Middle English striken, ystriken, from Old English stricen, ġestricen, from Proto-West Germanic strikan, from Proto-Germanic strikanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic strīkaną (“to strike”). Cognate with stq strieken, Dutch gestreken, German Low German streken, German gestrichen.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

stricken in the wild

  • All ships in these facilities are inactive, but some are still on the Naval Vessel Register (NVR), while others have been stricken from the register.

    Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility

  • Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo is a painting of 1624 by Anthony van Dyck, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1871.

    Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo

  • There, not far from the entrance, stood Sonia, pale and horror-stricken.

    Crime and Punishment· Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.