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Past tense of “dive”

🤿 To jump into water head first.

Number 114 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both dived. Recognising it is the priority.

British and American English

Dove is American and increasingly common; dived is standard everywhere and never wrong.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, dived. Half the work disappears: learn dive · dived and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — He dived into the pool. is the past simple, She has dived off that cliff before. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

There is no tidy rule connecting dive to dived — this is a verb you memorise as a pair and stop analysing. The consolation is that it is a pair and not a trio: dived is the only wrong answer worth guarding against.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: