Home → Irregular verbs → forsake
Past tense of “forsake”
🥀 To leave someone or something forever.
Number 169 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 “forsake”
Not “forsaked”. Forsake does not take -ed — the past simple is forsook, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have forsook”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have forsaken, never I have forsook. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
The participle goes back to the base
forsake · forsook · forsaken. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: forsake → forsaken, with forsook 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 forsook his old friends.
- Past participle: She has forsaken the city for a farm.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
Practise it
Drill forsake and 174 more on your phone
Spaced repetition, offline, free. What the app does →