strike off

See also: strikeoff

English

strike off (third-person singular simple present strikes off, present participle striking off, simple past struck off, past participle struck off or stricken off)

(transitive) To remove from a list or register.
The doctor was struck off the medical register for professional misconduct.
(transitive) To erase from an account; to deduct.
(transitive) To print.
(transitive) To separate by a blow.
(intransitive) To start going in a new direction or course of endeavor.
- 1952 February, R. A. H. Weight, “A Railway Recorder in Wessex”, in Railway Magazine, page 130:
  This is a country of great open spaces, amid which, in the neighbourhood of Dean, the rather remote looking single line to Fordingbridge and Wimborne strikes off to the south-west.
- 2003, Donald Mitchell, Paul Banks, David Matthews, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, page 208:
  On the other hand, it may well have been his very familiarity with the work his predecessors had already done in this field, Schubert's and Bruckner's in particular, that encouraged him to strike off on a new line of his own; one must always bear in mind that Mahler lived at the end of a great musical tradition and was obliged to innovate, to assert his originality, if he was to survive as an independent voice.
- 2010, Harold Nicolson, Why Britain is at War:
  Instead of the middle course which had been followed by previous statesmen, he struck off on a new line, veering well to starboard, and avoiding the cranks, the experts and the sentimentalists on the port side.