strike off
strike off (phrasal verb)
/straɪk ɒf/
Meaning
- Take a person’s name off an official list so they are no longer allowed to work in that job.
- Cross a name or item off a list because it no longer belongs there.
- Drop a charge or write off money that was owed.
- Head off in a new direction, often with a burst of purpose.
- Knock something out quickly and without much fuss.
- Chop something away with a hard blow.
- Take a company off the official register so it no longer exists on paper.
Synonyms: cross off, cross out, strike out, delete, remove, erase, expunge, cut off, sever, cancel, write off, set off, head off.
Example Sentences
- After the inquiry, the board voted to strike off the surgeon, and he lost the right to practice.
- Sarah asked Mike to strike off everyone who had already paid so the list would stay clean.
- The shop owner smiled and said he would strike off the last twenty dollars from the bill.
- At first light the hikers strike off into the woods instead of sticking to the marked path.
- When the editor needed a note in a hurry, she could strike off a few lines in minutes.
- One clean swing of the axe was enough to strike off the dead branch.
- Once the paperwork was done, they moved to strike off the old company from the register.
Etymology and Origin
A Blow That Became a Phrase
Strike off did not begin as office language. It grew from an old English verb that once meant to pass a hand over a surface, to smooth it, or simply to move along. Related words in other Germanic tongues carried the same idea of stroking, rubbing, or pressing. Over the centuries that gentle motion hardened. Strike came to mean a real blow, and off named what the blow removed. The pairing is almost pictorial. Something is there, a stroke lands, and it is gone.
An English Beginning
The phrase is native to the British Isles. Its first printed traces appear in late medieval Scotland and in Tudor England, not as a later import. Everyday life supplied the picture. A weapon could take off an ear or a head. A clerk’s pen could take a name off a roll. Both acts felt like the same clean cut, which is why one wording served both worlds.
Steel Before Paper
The oldest printed use is physical. Around 1485, Gilbert Hay’s Book of the Law of Arms retells the Gospel moment when Peter wounds Malchus:
“Sanct petir..strake of, Malcus ere.”
The meaning is blunt. A stroke severs what it hits. That sense never left the language. Writers kept using strike off for a branch chopped away, a helmet knocked aside, or a head taken from a body. Even when the phrase moved indoors, it still carried the sound of an axe.
When Ink Learned the Same Stroke
By 1597 the wording had crossed onto the page. Richard Hooker used strike off for cancelling a duty or removing a name as if a pen had drawn a line through it. The transfer is easy to feel. A clerk scoring out an entry was doing with ink what a swordsman had done with steel. From then on, the phrase belonged to lists, ledgers, and official rolls. To strike someone off was to treat the name as finished.
Taken Off the Roll
Law and professional life gave the phrase its sharpest modern edge. A solicitor could be struck off the roll. A doctor could be struck off the register. The point was never only tidying a page. It was shutting a person out of a closed trade whose right to work depended on remaining listed. Later company law borrowed the same picture. A firm struck off the register stops existing on paper. The corporate version is colder, but the gesture is the same old line through a name.
The Same Motion, Other Jobs
Not every later use smells of disgrace. Because strike once meant to go forward, people could strike off into woods or strike off on a new path. Printers and hurried writers used it for knocking out copies or composing something fast. Grain sellers had long struck off a measure by drawing a flat stick across the rim so the heap sat level. Those senses sit beside the legal one. They all rest on one image: a single motion that finishes the work.
Why the Phrase Still Cuts
There is a quiet irony in how the wording aged. The professional sense that now frightens doctors and lawyers arrived later as a fixed formula, yet it feels ancient because it still sounds like an executioner’s stroke. English never softened the phrase. A line through a name still lands like a blow, and that is why the same two words have travelled from a medieval ear to a modern register without losing their force.
Variants
- strike somebody/something off
- strike somebody/something off a list
- be struck off
- stricken off
- strike off from
- strike off on a new path
- strike off into
- company strike off
- voluntary strike off
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