Category:Quirk class 4 E

This is the sub-class of Quirk's class 4 of irregular verbs. It is defined by the peculiarity that the vowels of the past tense and the past participle have different vowels in special alternative forms. In all three of the verbs in this sub-class, the vowel of the base from is 'I' (IPA: /aɪ/, and the past vowels vary between this and 'oh' (IPA: /əʊ/). Two of the three ('shrive' and 'thrive') are archaic, and the variant past tense of the third ('to dive'), dove, appears to be a kind of false archaism (it first appears - in both Britain and the USA, in the 19th century, and is first recorded in pront in Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (Hiawatha's Fishing) in 1855. (See also Dive - dove.) So this category and its three verbs will not seem very important to most users of English.