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Past tense of “drive”

🚗 To control a car and make it move.

Number 46 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and three separate forms to keep apart. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “drive”

Not “drived”. Drive does not take -ed — the past simple is drove, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have drove”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have driven, never I have drove. 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 participle goes back to the base

drive · drove · driven. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: drive → driven, with drove having nothing to do with it.

Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.

Either way the ending does the work for you. A form ending in -n needs have, has, had or a passive be in front of it; without one it stands alone as the past — He drove us to the airport on Monday.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: