Home → Irregular verbs → take
Past tense of “take”
✋ To move something into your hands and carry it.
Number 10 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 “take”
Not “taked” or “tooked”. Take does not take -ed — the past simple is took, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have took”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have taken, never I have took. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Do not confuse it with…
Direction is the whole difference: you take things away from where you are, and bring them towards it.
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
take · took · taken. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: take → taken, with took 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 took the bus to work yesterday.
- Past participle: Someone has taken my umbrella.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
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