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Past tense of “give”

🎁 To hand something to someone.

Number 13 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and three separate forms to keep apart. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.

Mistakes people make with “give”

Not “gived”. Give does not take -ed — the past simple is gave, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have gave”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have given, never I have gave. 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

give · gave · given. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: give → given, with gave 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 gave me his old guitar last year.

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