Strife

Strife (pronounced strahyf)

(1) Vigorous or bitter conflict, discord, or antagonism.

(2) A quarrel, struggle, or clash; competition or rivalry.

(3) Earnest endeavor; hard work, strenuous effort (now rare and listed by some dictionaries as archaic).

(4) Exertion or contention for superiority, either by physical or intellectual means. 

(5) In colloquial use, a trouble of any kind.

(6) That which is contended against; occasion of contest (obsolete).

Circa 1200: From the Middle English strif, stryf & striffe (quarrel; fight; discord) from the Old French estrif (fight; battle; combat; conflict; torment; distress; dispute; quarrel), akin to estriver (to strive) from the Frankish strīban.  Estrif was a variant of estrit (quarrel; dispute; impetuosity), probably from the Frankish strid (strife; combat), or another Germanic source (there was the Old High German strit (quarrel; dispute), related to stritan (to fight) and the Proto-Germanic strīdō (combat; strife).  Related were the Dutch strijd (fight; battle; conflict), the German Streit (quarrel; dispute) and the Icelandic stríð (war).  Strife is a noun; the noun plural is most commonly strife but strifes is also used (such as when referring to various types of strifes or a collection of strifes), noted with greater frequency in literary and poetic use.

Strife, strive and strove

The verb strive is from the Middle English striven (to strive), drawn from the Old French estriver (to quarrel, dispute, resist, struggle, put up a fight, compete) it became a strong verb (the past tense being strove) by rhyming association with drive, dive etc.  The meaning shift to "try hard" began in the early fourteenth century and has evolved to the point where strife and strive now run in parallel with their different senses.  Strife has retained its original meaning (quarrel; conflict et al) white strive is now exclusively taken to mean “working hard to achieve something”.  Some sources list “striving” as archaic which may be premature but “strove”, the past participle of strive, certainly is, most authorities labelling it as obsolete, colloquial or nonstandard.  In common use in educated English as late as the early twentieth century, it’s now rare and more often found in the text of non-native English speakers who use sometimes words which, while technically correct, have fallen from flavor, some software translation programs producing similar quirks.

An image from an early life of strife: Lindsay (2019) by Sam McKinniss (b 1985) (left), from a reference photograph taken 22 July 2012, leaving the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, LA (right).

Although he would live another fifteen troubled years, in 1849 the poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) wrote an epitaph for himself on his seventy-fourth birthday:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art;

I warm'd both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.