Past Tense of “smite”
The past tense of smite is smote; the past participle is smitten.
Why “smite” behaves this way
"Smite" descends from Old English "smitan," originally meaning simply "to smear" or "to strike," a Class I strong verb related to German "schmeißen" (to throw or fling). Its conjugation, smite/smote/smitten, follows the exact same ablaut pattern as "write/wrote/written" and "ride/rode/ridden" — long "i" in the present, long "o" in the past simple, and short "i" plus "-en" in the participle — placing it in one of English's most productive and recognizable strong-verb families.
"Smite" carries an unusually strong religious and literary register today, largely because of its heavy use in the King James Bible, where God "smites" enemies, plagues, and cities dozens of times. That biblical association has frozen the verb almost entirely into elevated, archaic, or humorous registers in modern English; it's rarely used for ordinary physical striking anymore, having been displaced by "hit" or "strike" in everyday speech while retaining its full, ancient conjugation in formal and literary contexts. Because it survived largely through scripture and formal literature rather than everyday speech, "smite" is one of relatively few strong verbs whose conjugation was essentially preserved by its written record rather than by continuous oral transmission, unlike "speak" or "break," which stayed common in daily conversation the entire time.
The common confusion
The main modern confusion is that "smitten," the participle, has drifted almost entirely into a separate meaning — "infatuated" or "charmed," as in "he was smitten with her" — while "smote" has stayed tied to the older sense of striking down or afflicting. Because these two forms now feel like they belong to nearly different verbs in meaning, writers sometimes hesitate over whether "smitten" can still describe physical striking at all (it can, in formal or biblical registers, though it's rare). A separate confusion arises for readers encountering "smote" for the first time in older text, who sometimes mistake it for a typo of "smoke" or "smote" as a dialectal spelling, rather than recognizing it as a fully standard, dictionary-listed simple-past form.
How it's actually used
In contemporary writing "smite" survives mainly in three contexts: deliberately archaic or biblical-toned prose, fantasy and gaming vocabulary (where a "smite" is often a named magical attack), and the idiom "smitten," which has become a standard, non-archaic way to describe sudden romantic infatuation, used constantly in ordinary modern writing despite its ancient verb root. In fantasy and role-playing contexts, "smite" is frequently used as a noun as well as a verb ("cast a smite," "use your smite"), a modern grammatical extension that has no precedent in the verb's Old English history but has become thoroughly conventionalized within gaming vocabulary over the past few decades.
Across the tense system
Because "smote" and "smitten" are fully distinct, this verb requires careful attention in the perfect tense: "the plague had smitten the city" is grammatically correct but reads as heavily archaic; modern writers reaching for the perfect tense of the striking sense typically avoid the construction altogether, favoring a synonym like "struck" or "afflicted" instead, while keeping "smitten" alive specifically for the romantic sense, where the perfect tense ("he has been smitten ever since") sounds perfectly natural.
Common real mistakes
The most common error is producing "smited" as a regularized past form, especially in casual or online gaming writing where users unfamiliar with the archaic conjugation reach for the default "-ed" pattern. A second, subtler error is using "smote" where "smitten" is grammatically required, as in an incorrect "he was smote with love" instead of the correct "he was smitten with love," since the passive and adjectival uses require the participle, not the simple past. A third error, seen in gaming and fantasy fiction, is inventing a nonstandard present-tense third person "smiteth" or similarly archaic-flavored spelling that doesn't match any historical form of the verb, produced by writers reaching for a generically "old-sounding" ending rather than the verb's actual historical conjugation.
Examples
- The general was smitten with the young diplomat at first sight.
- According to legend, the storm smote the fleet without warning.
- She has been smitten with him since their first conversation.
- The plague was said to have smitten the entire village.
- He smote the sword against the shield in a show of defiance.
- They were utterly smitten with the puppy the moment they saw it.
Memory trick
Split its two lives cleanly: "smote" belongs to the old, dramatic sense of striking down, while "smitten" has quietly become the everyday word for falling head over heels. If you mean "in love," you almost certainly want "smitten," not "smote."