Past Tense of “rise”
The past tense of rise is rose; the past participle is risen.
Why “rise” behaves this way
"Rise" comes from Old English "rīsan," another class-1 strong verb in the same family as "write" and "ride," originally meaning simply "to get up" or "to stand up" from a lying or sitting position, a sense still central to the word today. Crucially, "rise" is intransitive — the subject rises on its own — which sets it apart from its close cousin "raise," a transitive weak verb meaning to cause something else to rise.
"Raise" actually entered English later as a borrowing from Old Norse "reisa," a causative form built on the very same Germanic root as "rise" — so the two verbs are etymological siblings, not unrelated words that happen to look alike, even though one is irregular (rose/risen) and the other is perfectly regular (raised/raised).
The common confusion
The single biggest real confusion is "rise" versus "raise": "the sun rises" (intransitive, no object) but "she raises her hand" (transitive, takes an object) — mixing the two, as in "she rises her hand," is one of the most common grammar errors in English precisely because the verbs sound so historically and semantically close. 'Rise' and 'raise' also diverge sharply in their nominal forms in different dialects: British English speaks of 'a rise' in salary, while American English almost always says 'a raise,' even though both nouns trace back to the same etymological root and describe the identical concept of increased pay.
How it's actually used
"Rise" appears constantly in economic and political language — "prices rise," "tensions rise," "a rising star" — always intransitively, describing something increasing or ascending on its own rather than being lifted by an external agent, a distinction that matters especially in careful journalistic and financial writing. 'Rise' also names the increase itself as a noun in British English, as in 'a pay rise,' where American English instead prefers 'a raise' — the same etymological root splitting into two different dialects' preferred nouns for the identical concept. Finally, 'on the rise' functions as a fixed adjectival phrase describing something currently increasing, a construction that freezes the noun form of the verb into an idiom used constantly in news writing about trends, crime rates, and prices alike.
Across the tense system
The participle "risen" shows up in the fixed religious phrase "He is risen," an archaic-sounding construction using "is" rather than "has" as the auxiliary — a survival of an older English pattern, once common with verbs of motion and change of state, that has otherwise almost entirely disappeared from modern usage. The compound verb 'arise,' built on the same root as 'rise,' inflects nearly identically (arose/arisen) and is generally reserved for abstract situations — 'a problem arose,' 'concerns have arisen' — while plain 'rise' handles both the literal and figurative senses more broadly, giving English two closely related but stylistically distinct options.
Common real mistakes
Confusing "rise" with "raise" ("she rises her hand" instead of "she raises her hand") is by far the most frequent error, since the two verbs are historically related and semantically overlapping. A separate, purely tense-based error is using "rose" after a helping verb instead of "risen" ("prices have rose"), common in casual speech. Because the confusion between 'rise' and 'raise' is so persistent, some style guides recommend a simple substitution test: if 'lift' can replace the verb in the sentence without changing its basic meaning, 'raise' is almost certainly correct; if 'get up' or 'increase on its own' fits better, 'rise' is the right choice instead.
Examples
- The sun rose over the hills at dawn.
- Prices have risen sharply this year.
- Bread dough rises best in a warm room.
- Tensions were rising steadily throughout the negotiation.
- Had the tide risen any further, the dock would have flooded.
- The company's stock rose ten percent overnight.
- Let's rise early and beat the traffic.
- Her voice is rising with excitement.
Memory trick
Remember the object test: if you can name something being lifted ("she raises the flag"), the verb is the regular "raise"; if nothing is being lifted except the subject itself ("the flag rises"), it's the irregular "rise/rose/risen." To fix the past forms, group "rise" with "write" and "ride": rose/risen mirrors wrote/written and rode/ridden exactly.