Drive (irregular verb)

'To drive' is an irregular verb. Its forms are given here:

Base form	past tense	-ed participle	Remarks
drive	drove	driven

This is one of the "the 250 or so irregular verbs" listed in Quirk 1985. The list "contains most of the irregular verbs in present-day English ... but is not meant to be exhaustive, particularly with regard to derivative verbs." AWE has copied most of the entries in that list. The verb 'to drive' belongs to Quirk's Class 4 C a.

The vowel change between present and past tenses is a regular feature of Germanic languages. In northern dialects, the past was normally drave until the seventeenth century. (In Middle and Old English, this could be written as draf.)