/draɪv/Show Spelled[drahyv]Show IPAverb, drove or (Archaic) drave, driv·en, driv·ing,noun, adjective
verb (used with object)
1.
to send, expel, or otherwise cause to move by force or compulsion: to drive away the flies; to drive back an attacking army; to drive a person to desperation.
2.
to cause and guide the movement of (a vehicle, an animal, etc.): to drive a car; to drive a mule.
3.
to convey in a vehicle: She drove them to the station.
4.
to force to work or act: He drove the workers until they collapsed.
a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.
a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.
a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.
a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.
an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance.
Synonyms 1. push, force. 2, 15.Drive,ride are used interchangeably to mean traveling in an automobile or, formerly, in a horse-drawn vehicle. These two words are not synonyms in other connections. To drive is to maneuver, guide, or steer the progress of a vehicle, animal, etc.: to drive a bus, a horse. To ride is to be carried about by an animal or be carried as a passenger in a vehicle: to ride a horse, a train, a bus. 28. push; ambition, motivation.
O.E. drifan (class I strong verb; past tense draf, pp. drifen), from P.Gmc. *dribanan (cf. O.N. drifa, Goth. dreiban), not found outside Germanic. Original sense of "pushing from behind," altered in Modern English by application to automobiles. Golfing sense of "forcible blow" is from 1836. Meaning "organized
effort to raise money" is 1889, Amer.Eng. The noun, in the computing sense, first attested 1963. Related: Driving. Drive-in (adj.) first recorded 1930, of restaurants, banks, movies, etc. Drive-through first attested 1949, in an advertisement for the Beer Vault Drive-Thru in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"The more you drive, the less intelligent you are." ["Repo Man"]
Mean to do or say, as in I don't understand what he's driving at. Today this idiom, first recorded in 1579, is used mainly with the participle driving.