Struck vs Stricken

Is struck or stricken correct in these sentences?

1. The house was stricken / struck by lightning.

2. The house had been stricken / struck by lightning.

3. He was stricken / struck by grief, cancer, etc.

Can by be replaced with with in the sentence above (Sentence No. 3)?

4. The judge had struck / stricken it from the record.

5. It was struck / stricken from the record.

Thank you.

Solution 1:

TMTOWTDI

You assume that there’s exactly one “right” answer and exactly one “wrong” answer, and that just isn’t the way things work in language. Different speakers will use different variants at different times (so will the same speaker), whether this is the participle or the preposition that goes with it.

That does not mean one is wrong and the other right. If you play around with Google Books, you find plenty of variation even in recent years, particularly in North America. Don’t speak of correctness; look instead at usage.

That said, under most circumstances the past participle of strike is now simply struck, although stricken is still sometimes used in North America even apart from the two principal exceptions I list below. Despite struck being the more common variant for the past participle in today’s English, two main areas are still dominated by the stricken variant:

1. When it concerns some malady, trouble, or affliction: stricken with/by grief, fever, remorse, refugees.

   

   

   OED citations for this sense include the following:

   • 1837 Carlyle Fr. Rev. I. v. v, ― Hot old Marquis Mirabeau lies stricken down, at Argenteuil.
   • 1891 E. Peacock N. Brendon II. 199 ― The Duke had been stricken by paralysis.
   • 1891 Speaker 11 July 36/2 ― The fear is··that public life may be stricken with sterility in consequence of this veto.

   As you see by those citations, both stricken by and stricken with wind up getting used:

   

2. When it is means to remove something, especially in legal language such as striking things from the record or striking jurors from the case: the next three words shall be stricken out; the next juror stricken by the state; the judge ordered it stricken from the record.

   

   OED citations for this sense include:

   • 1829 Rep. Supreme Court Tennessee (1832) IX. 229 ― That an attorney may be stricken from the roll for good cause, none can doubt.
   • 1861 Congr. Globe 18 Feb. 947/2, ― I will read the words to be stricken out.
   • 1906 Federal Reporter (1907) CXLVII. 451 ― All of the testimony given by the witness··is withdrawn and stricken out of this case.
   • 1915 Southwestern Reporter CLXXV. 661/1 ― No further steps··were taken in the case until the February term, 1904, of the Magoffin circuit court, when it was stricken from the docket.
   • 1938 Congress Rec. 24 May 7405/2 ― That the Committee do··report the bill back to the House with the recommendation that the enacting clause be stricken out.
   • 1957 Reports Supreme Court Kansas (1958) CLXXXI. 623 ― In our opinion the reply was erroneously stricken.
   • 1965 Pacific Reporter CCCCIV. 230/2 ― Where··a second clause appears which expresses a different intent and declares a life estate plus a remainder which is void under the rule, the qualifying clause will be stricken.
   • 1978 N.Y. Times 29 Mar. b3/4 ― Over strong objections from the prosecutor, Sybil R. Moses, Judge William J. Arnold ordered the question stricken.

Although those are the two main hold-outs where stricken still prevails as the past participle, you can still sometimes find it used from time to time in North America for situations where struck is now more common, such as this recent example:

• 1976 National Observer (U.S.) 9 Oct. 7/4 ― A new trend in comics has stricken down many of the old taboos.

Normally things like old trends or old court decisions are struck down by newer ones. But this is not guaranteed, as the previous citation shows. Just because some people say things differently doesn’t mean they’re wrong; they’re just different.

English has many, many past-tense forms and past participles where multiple possibilities are commonly used. Don’t think there can be only one way to do it. Language is not arithmetic. There’s more than one way to do it.

Regarding which preposition — if any — gets used with strike, it just depends since there are so many possibilities, especially in the historical record. Here as before, several possible choices exist, all equally viable.

What would I myself personally say? I would probably say:

People who survive being struck by lightning are often stricken with debilitating after-effects for the rest of their lives.

As you see, both forms can certainly be used, particularly when a shaded nuance is desired as in my example sentence: the first is a blow, the second a trouble.

Solution 2:

Struck is used for any physical contact where stricken is used as more of an abstraction, meaning to be afflicted by or removed from depending on the context.

1) The house was struck by lightning

2) The boy was stricken with pox

3) He has been stricken from home