DRIVE, verb transitive preterit tense Drove, [formerly drave; participle passive Driven, G.]

1. To impel or urge forward by force; to force; to move by physical force. We drive a nail into wood with a hammer; the wind or a current drive a ship on the ocean.

2. To compel or urge forward by other means than absolute physical force, or by means that compel the will; as, to drive cattle to market. A smoke drives company from the room. A man may be drive by the necessities of the times, to abandon his country.

DRIVE thy business; let not thy business drive thee.

3. To chase; to hunt.

To drive the deer with hound and horn.

4. To impel a team of horses or oxen to move forward, and to direct their course; hence, to guide or regulate the course of the carriage drawn by them. We say, to drive a team, or to drive a carriage drawn by a team.

5. To impel to greater speed.

6. To clear any place by forcing away what is in it.

To drive the country, force the swains away.

7. To force; to compel; in a general sense.

8. To hurry on inconsiderately; often with on. In this sense it is more generally intransitive.

9. To distress; to straighten; as desperate men far driven.

10. To impel by influence of passion. Anger and lust often drive men into gross crimes.

11. To urge; to press; as, to drive an argument.

12. To impel by moral influence; to compel; as, the reasoning of his opponent drove him to acknowledge his error.

13. To carry on; to prosecute; to keep in motion; as, to drive a trade; to drive business.

14. To make light by motion or agitation; as, to drive feathers.

His thrice driven bed of down.

The sense is probably to beat; but I do not recollect this application of the word in America.

To drive away, to force to remove to a distance; to expel; to dispel; to scatter.

To drive off, to compel to remove from a place; to expel; to drive to a distance.

To drive out, to expel.

DRIVE, verb intransitive

1. To be forced along; to be impelled; to be moved by any physical force or agent; as, a ship drives before the wind.

2. To rush and press with violence; as, a storm drives against the house.

Fierce Boreas drove against his flying sails.

3. To pass in a carriage; as, he drove to London. This phrase is elliptical. He drove his horses or carriage to London.

4. To aim at or tend to; to urge towards a point; to make an effort to reach or obtain; as, we know the end the author is driving at.

5. To aim a blow; to strike at with force.

Four rogues in buckram let drive at me.

DRIVE, in all its senses, implies forcible or violent action. It is opposed to lead. To drive a body is to move it by applying a force behind; to lead is to cause to move by applying the force before, or forward of the body.

DRIVE, noun Passage in a carriage.