What does "downstrike" mean?

A bolt of lightning that touches ground.

Downstrike

adj, adv, noun, verb

adj, adv, noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level

Noun

1
A bolt of lightning that touches ground.
"Seventeen hundred downstrikes of lightning later, destruction reigns over southwest Oregon."
2
A (usually unintended) branch of current that arcs downward to ground.
"Besides forming new cores, arcs may also form branches, and "downstrikes" are liable to be particularly troublesome."
3
A blow by a hand or weapon that occurs with a downward striking motion.
"Attacker executes a downstrike. Defender performs a two-hand catch, blocks, rotates through and performs an elbow-break with accompanying shoulder dislocation."
4
A downward plucking motion on a stringed instrument.
"How the guitarist chooses to create the differences between the accented and unaccented notes has usually been left up to the player, although it is usual for players to use a downstrike (apoyando) for an accented tone and an upstroke (tirando) for an unaccented tone."
5
A downstroke; a downward movement that terminates in striking something.
"It is sort of like paying a carpenter for the downstrike of his hammer and saying the upstroke is on his on time."

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6
A type of manual typewriter that causes the letters to print on the downstroke of the keys and retract as the key rises.
"These machines had straight-line keyboards and a semicircular downstrike typebasket that made for easy visibility by the typist."
7
A variety of various devices that operates primarily by a downward striking action.
"My invention relates to pianofortes of the general character embodied in my United States Letters Patent No. 2,377,582, issued June 5, 1945, and wherein is disclosed and claimed a horizontal, downstrike hammer action particularly adapted, although not necessarily, for use in a lightweight, portable piano."
8
A line that is drawn with a downward stroke.
"I have marked the accented syllable by the Downstrike, leaving the unaccented ones to the Upstrike"

Verb

1
To strike down; to knock down, kill, or cripple.
"Nearly twenty years have elapsed since my friend was downstruck by his attack."
2
To dismay, reject, demote, or render lowly.
"Did you imagine us bigguns your servants, mebbe, or some such downstruck types?' 'Nobody were downstruck there. They were all with telling me what to do."
3
To arc to ground in a downstrike.
"While a number of successful interruptions were made with this chute, it exhibited a proneness to "downstrike." The arc would run down one of the baffles onto one of the arcing contacts and short- circuit a portion of the metallic baffle stack."
4
To strike from above.
"This was a downstriking hammer which hit the strings at a point where a silk band revolved against them, activated by a treadle."
5
To move downward in a striking motion.
"Parsival bounced upright and as the fellow reined close and chopped a swordstroke at his head the young knight, forgetting his own weapon in his rage, caught the downstriking arm with both hands and heaved the shocked man up out of his seat, across his own horse's neck, and spinning down the hill after his companion who was still rolling, quite slowly now, in the lush green field."

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6
To go in a downward direction.
"Those which are full of spindly, ingrowing wood we will thin rigorously, working with one of the nursery models before our mind's eye, and taking care that when our task is done, not a single ingrowing or downstriking shoot is left on the tree."
7
To point (finish a joint) by pressing mortar in at the bottom.
"There was no trace of plaster inside the stair tower in the Barns: most of the interior was in brick, and the mortar pointing was downstruck and usually scored."
8
To play a stringed instrument with a downward plucking motion.
"Armstrong doesn't use the story-within-a-story motif; his version begins with a New Orleans funeral jazz slow shuffle, picking up the tempo at 0.08, led by Armstrong's trumpet, trailed by the unmistakably wildly wandering New Orleans clarinet, skeletal barrelhouse piano, downstruck banjo and the ragged-shoed chuf-chuf-chuf of the melancholic New Orleans swing."

Adjective

1
downward or further down.
"The Earlies Gap Biotite Gneiss may therefore indicate a downstrike lithologic change resulting from original variations of the protolith and from a more thorough."

Adverb

1
In a downward direction
"Amal supracrustals and other rocks were traced from the syncline core to the rest of Magnusson's (1960) 'Gothian' area and thence downstrike across the alleged Gothian-Pregothian boundary into the 'Pregothian' region."

"Seventeen hundred downstrikes of lightning later, destruction reigns over southwest Oregon."

From down + strike.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.