Word.ws English Dictionary

gainstrove

gainstrove is the simple past of gainstrive.

Meaning of gainstrive

Verb

gainstrive (third-person singular simple present gainstrives, present participle gainstriving, simple past gainstrived or gainstrove, past participle gainstrived or gainstrove or gainstriven)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To strive against; to resist, oppose.
  2. (intransitive, obsolete) To resist; to fight back.
    • For on the spoile of women he doth live, / Whose bodies chast, when ever in his powre / He may them catch unable to gainstrive, / He with his shamefull lust doth first deflowre, / And afterwardes themselves doth cruelly devoure.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Questions about gainstrove

What is gainstrove the simple past of?
Gainstrove is the simple past of gainstrive.

Words near gainstrove in the dictionary

  1. gainstrive
  2. gainstrived
  3. gainstriven
  4. gainstrives
  5. gainstriving
  6. gainstrove
  7. gaintaking
  8. gainward
  9. gainwise
  10. gainword
  11. gainwords

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gainstrove (page history and authors); gainstrive (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: “gainstrove.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gainstrove. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.