> I consider myself fluent in English, I watch technical talks and casual youtubers on English daily, and this is the first time I encounter this word lol.

> The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array

I am also not a native English speaker, but I got to know the verb to "to stride" from The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn is originally introduced under the name "Strider":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aragorn&oldid=132...

"Aragorn is a fictional character and a protagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is a Ranger of the North, first introduced with the name Strider and later revealed to be the heir of Isildur, an ancient King of Arnor and Gondor."

People don't discuss how people walk in daily conversation, so it's a word primarily encountered in literature, and more common in specific types of literature (like romance novels to describe how a man paces about with swagger).

I was a hurdler in high school and mastering stride length was almost the entire point of practicing. It's equally weird to me to see someone claiming to be fluent in English who has never heard the word. Maybe a reminder that we're not as knowledgeable as we think we are and what we choose to consume on YouTube is a tiny smittance of human experience. Running is a fairly universal and important thing for nearly any land animal, hardly a niche thing to talk about, but if you had ever talked to or listened to runners speaking English, you'd have definitely heard them talking about their strides.

Verbal fluency is a completely different ballgame to literary fluency. Literature uses vastly more words. Stride is a pretty common one.

Open a collegiate dictionary to a series of random pages, checking the first word to see if you can give any vague definition of it. A fluent speaker who doesn't read literature will likely be able to for fewer than 1/4th of them. A decent literary vocabulary would know ~2/3 or more imo.

I wonder if you've heard the expression "hitting your stride".

(native english speaker who was a bookworm as a kid; I admittedly had to ask gemini to recall the general phrase that I had in mind)

Indeed "to stride" is roughly to walk with a larger than normal distance (gap) between steps.