Word.ws English Dictionary

bestridden

bestridden is the past participle of bestride.

Meaning of bestride

Verb

bestride (third-person singular simple present bestrides, present participle bestriding, simple past bestrode, past participle bestrode or bestridden or bestrid)

  1. (transitive) To be astride something, to stand over or sit on with legs on either side, especially to sit on a horse.
    • & thou were the truest frende to thy louar that euer bestrade hors
      "And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse"1485, Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur Book XXI, Chapter xiii, leaf 430v
    Synonyms:
    straddle
  2. (transitive) To stride over, or across.
  3. (figuratively, transitive) To dominate.
    • Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus[…].c. 1599, William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act I Scene II

Questions about bestridden

What is bestridden the past participle of?
Bestridden is the past participle of bestride.

Words near bestridden in the dictionary

  1. bestrewment
  2. bestrewments
  3. bestrewn
  4. bestrews
  5. bestrid
  6. bestridden
  7. bestride
  8. bestrides
  9. bestriding
  10. bestrip
  11. bestriped

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bestridden (page history and authors); bestride (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bestridden.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bestridden. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.