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Past tense of “forgive”
🕊️ To stop being angry with someone.
Number 134 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: three separate forms to keep apart. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “forgive”
Not “forgived”. Forgive does not take -ed — the past simple is forgave, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have forgave”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have forgiven, never I have forgave. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Do not confuse it with…
They pair up in the saying “forgive and forget”, but nothing else connects them — different meanings, different patterns.
The participle goes back to the base
forgive · forgave · forgiven. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: forgive → forgiven, with forgave 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 — She forgave him at last.
- Past participle: I have never forgiven myself for that.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
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