STRIFE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does strife mean? 

• STRIFE (noun)
  The noun STRIFE has 2 senses:

1. lack of agreement or harmony

2. bitter conflict; heated often violent dissension

  Familiarity information: STRIFE used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• STRIFE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Lack of agreement or harmony

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Synonyms:

discord; strife

Hypernyms ("strife" is a kind of...):

disorder (a disturbance of the peace or of public order)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Bitter conflict; heated often violent dissension

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Hypernyms ("strife" is a kind of...):

battle; conflict; struggle (an open clash between two opposing groups (or individuals))

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "strife"):

countercurrent; crosscurrent (actions counter to the main group activity)

discord; discordance (strife resulting from a lack of agreement)

 Context examples 

The distance was nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife?

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

We knew your father well, and would fain help his son, though we have small cause to love your brother the Socman, who is forever stirring up strife in the county.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It is in scenes of strife and danger—where courage is proved, and energy exercised, and fortitude tasked—that he will speak and move, the leader and superior.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

It was only the tame that the gods protected, and between the tame deadly strife was not permitted.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

That tiny men should live and breathe and work, and drive so frail a contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous an elemental strife.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

These days, with so many planets opposite your sign, there is an indication of either perfect agreement or maddening strife.

(AstrologyZone.com, by Susan Miller)

He kept François busy, for the dog-driver was in constant apprehension of the life-and-death struggle between the two which he knew must take place sooner or later; and on more than one night the sounds of quarrelling and strife among the other dogs turned him out of his sleeping robe, fearful that Buck and Spitz were at it.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

His thin lips, like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again, pursing caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said something more—the poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without words which could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations of common words.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)