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Past tense of “drink”
🥤 To take liquid into your mouth and swallow it.
Number 27 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the vowel walks i → a → u. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.
Mistakes people make with “drink”
Not “drinked”. Drink does not take -ed — the past simple is drank, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have drank”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have drunk, never I have drank. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Phrases you will actually hear
These are worth learning whole. A verb sticks far better inside a phrase somebody would really say than on its own in a table.
The vowel walks i → a → u
Only one letter is doing the work. drink becomes drank becomes drunk, and everything around the vowel stays where it is.
Say the three aloud and you can hear the staircase: i → a → u. This is the oldest verb pattern in the language, inherited from Germanic, and it is the one group where guessing actually works — meet a new verb of this shape and you can usually predict its forms.
The mistake to avoid is stopping halfway: I have drank instead of I have drunk. The u form belongs after have.
- Past simple: He drank two cups of coffee yesterday.
- Past participle: She has drunk all the juice.
The same pattern — i → a → u — runs through 8 verbs:
Practise it
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