Other forms: strides, strode, striding
To stride is to walk with long, decisive steps, the way somebody crosses a room once they have made up their mind. Boots loud on a corridor floor, coat open, everyone else stepping aside.
The noun is one of those steps and the length of it, as in a horse with a long stride, or four strides to the door. In the plural it turns into progress, so a hospital that has made great strides on waiting times has nobody walking anywhere. Two phrases carry it further: to take something in your stride is to meet a problem without breaking rhythm, and to hit your stride is to reach the pace where the work goes easily. The past tense is strode, which trips people up, so it is he strode out rather than he strided out. Stride is neither stroll nor march: a stroll is slow, a march is in step with other people, a stride is quick and entirely your own.
1verbstrideTo walk with long, purposeful steps.
“She strides across the yard with the dog trailing behind her.”
synonyms: march
2noundistanceA long step, or the distance covered by one step.
“Three strides took him to the window.”
3nounclearStrides: clear progress in something.
“The team has made big strides since January.”
stride is a way of walking.
Stride is Old English stridan, from Proto-Germanic stridana, and it reached Middle English as striden. Its relatives took a harder turn: Dutch strijden and German streiten both mean to fight or to quarrel. Somewhere between the languages the word split, and English kept the walking while the neighbours kept the fighting.
Proto-Germanic
*strīdaną
Proto-West Germanic
*strīdan
Old English
strīdan — stride
Middle English
striden
English, today
stride
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