Home → Irregular verbs → smite

Past tense of “smite”

🗡️ To hit very hard (old use).

Number 175 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 “smite”

Not “smited”. Smite does not take -ed — the past simple is smote, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have smote”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have smitten, never I have smote. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

The participle goes back to the base

smite · smote · smitten. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: smite → smitten, with smote 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 — The hero smote the giant.

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