Past Tense of “drink”
The past tense of drink is drank; the past participle is drunk.
Why “drink” behaves this way
"Drink" comes from Old English "drincan," a class-3 strong verb sharing the identical i/a/u vowel pattern with "sing," "sink," and "begin." The word's core sense — to swallow liquid — has remained remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, one of the more semantically unchanged verbs in this entire ablaut family.
The adjective "drunk," describing intoxication, split off from the verbal participle centuries ago and took on an independent life of its own, complete with its own comparative and related noun forms ("drunkard," "drunkenness") that have nothing directly to do with the ordinary perfect tense of the verb "drink."
The common confusion
The real tense confusion follows the family pattern exactly: "I drunk three glasses of water" (participle misused as simple past) and "I have drank enough for tonight" (simple past misused as participle) are both extremely common slips, made slightly more awkward by the fact that "drunk" also independently means intoxicated, adding a layer of potential misreading. A further genuine subtlety is that 'drink,' used without any further object, often carries the specific implied meaning of consuming alcohol ('he doesn't drink'), a narrowing of meaning that context alone resolves, since the same bare verb with an explicit object ('drink water') carries no such implication at all.
How it's actually used
"Drink" extends into the fixed toast phrase "drink to," meaning to honor or celebrate something, and into the informal sense "drink in" a view or experience, meaning to absorb it appreciatively — both figurative uses that keep the drank/drunk pattern of the literal sense of consuming liquid. 'Drink' also names the beverage itself as a countable noun ('grab a drink'), a nominal use that split off from the verb centuries ago and now requires no conjugation, functioning as an ordinary object noun in everyday speech. One final idiom, 'drink to someone's health,' preserves an older ceremonial sense of toasting that predates the more casual modern use of 'drink' in everyday conversation about beverages.
Across the tense system
Because "drunk" carries a second, entirely independent meaning as an adjective for intoxication, careful writers often avoid the bare adjectival reading by adding context — "he has drunk his coffee" clearly reads as the verb form, while "he is drunk" clearly reads as the adjective, with the choice of auxiliary (has versus is) doing most of the disambiguating work. The compound noun 'soft drink,' naming a non-alcoholic beverage, and the simile 'drink like a fish,' describing someone who drinks heavily, both lock the base verb into set phrases where no conjugation ever applies, since neither compound can be inflected the way the ordinary verb 'drink' can.
Common real mistakes
Using "drunk" as a simple past ("I drunk the whole bottle") and using "drank" after a helping verb ("I have drank too much") are both frequent, widespread errors across casual and regional English. The additional overlap with the unrelated adjective "drunk" (meaning intoxicated) occasionally causes a moment of genuine ambiguity in speech, resolved almost entirely by context and surrounding auxiliary verbs. A separate rare error is applying 'drank' or 'drunk' to describe absorption by a non-human subject, such as soil or fabric, in overly literal ways when a native speaker would more naturally choose 'absorbed' — though the figurative use ('the soil drank up the rain') is nonetheless standard and grammatically identical to the literal sense.
Examples
- She drank a full glass of water after the run.
- He has drunk coffee every morning for thirty years.
- The plant drinks up water remarkably fast in summer heat.
- They were drinking tea and talking for hours.
- Had she drunk more water during the hike, she wouldn't have felt so dizzy.
- This bottle has never been drunk from.
- Let's drink to a successful year.
- The soil is drinking in the rain after the drought.
Memory trick
Group "drink" with "sing" and "sink": drank/drunk mirrors sang/sung and sank/sunk exactly, so the same i/a/u anchor works across all three. To avoid the awkward double meaning of "drunk," remember that as a verb form it always needs a helping verb ("has drunk," "had drunk"), while as a plain adjective describing intoxication it stands alone with no auxiliary required ("he is drunk").