Home → Irregular verbs → shrink
Past tense of “shrink”
🧺 To become smaller.
Number 139 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the vowel walks i → a → u. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “shrink”
Not “shrinked”. Shrink does not take -ed — the past simple is shrank, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have shrank”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have shrunk, never I have shrank. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
British and American English
Same pattern as sink: shrank is the tidier past, shrunk the participle — as the film title reminds everyone.
The vowel walks i → a → u
Only one letter is doing the work. shrink becomes shrank becomes shrunk, 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 shrank instead of I have shrunk. The u form belongs after have.
- Past simple: My sweater shrank in the wash.
- Past participle: The lake has shrunk over the years.
The same pattern — i → a → u — runs through 8 verbs:
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