diving

Usage Note: Either dove or dived is acceptable as the past tense of dive. In our 2008 survey 92 percent of the Usage Panel accepted dove and 72 percent accepted dived in the sentence. Keeping their New Year's Day tradition, the L Street Brownies dove/dived into Dorchester Bay this morning. This may seem odd considering that dived is actually the older form. In fact, the emergence of dove runs against the general tendency of change in English verb forms. Old English had two classes of verbs: strong verbs, whose past tense was indicated by a change in their vowel (a process that survives in such present-day English verbs as drive/drove and fling/flung); and weak verbs, whose past was formed with a suffix related to -ed in Modern English (as in present-day English live/lived and move/moved). Dive comes from one of these weak verbs. Since the Old English period, many verbs have changed from the strong pattern to the weak one; for example, the past tense of step, formerly stop, became stepped. Over the years, in fact, the weak pattern has become so prevalent that we use the term regular to refer to verbs that form their past tense by suffixation of -ed. However, there have occasionally been changes in the other direction: the past tense of wear, now wore, was once werede, and that of spit, now spat, was once spitede. The development of dove is an additional example of the small group of verbs that have swum against the historical tide.