Past Tense of “stink”
The past tense of stink is stank; the past participle is stunk.
Why “stink” behaves this way
"Stink" comes from Old English "stincan," originally a more neutral verb meaning simply "to smell" or "to give off an odor," without the specifically unpleasant connotation the word carries today — the closely related noun form eventually narrowed to mean only a bad smell, while the more neutral sense of odor generally survived in the separate verb "smell." It belongs to the same "-ink/-unk" ablaut family as "drink/drank/drunk" and "sink/sank/sunk," preserving the fuller three-way vowel split that some of its rhyming relatives, like "slink," lost long ago.
American English shows a growing tendency to use "stunk" as the simple past as well as the participle ("the fridge stunk for days" instead of the traditionally preferred "the fridge stank for days"), the same kind of dialectal leveling seen in "drink/drank/drunk" and "spring/sprang/sprung," where casual speech gradually collapses a three-form paradigm into two. Formal, edited writing still generally preserves "stank" as the standard simple past in both American and British English. This shared pattern across "drink," "spring," and "stink" suggests that this particular ablaut family, i/a/u vowel verbs with a nasal-plus-consonant ending, may be undergoing a broader, coordinated simplification across all its members rather than each verb changing independently by coincidence.
The common confusion
The live question for careful writers is whether "stank" or "stunk" belongs in the simple-past slot: style guides and dictionaries still specify "stank" ("the locker room stank after the game"), while everyday speech, especially in American English, increasingly reaches for "stunk" in that same position, a genuine ongoing change rather than a settled dispute, much like the parallel situation with "spring." A separate, unrelated confusion involves the informal exclamation "stinks!" used as a stand-alone complaint ("that stinks!"), which some learners mistakenly try to conjugate into the past as "that stank!" even in contexts where the present tense is clearly what's intended, simply because the exclamation feels like it needs a fuller sentence structure.
How it's actually used
"Stink" extends figuratively to describe something of poor quality or something suspicious — "this deal stinks," "something stinks about this arrangement" — and in this figurative sense the verb almost always stays in the present tense, functioning more like a general evaluative statement than a description of a specific past event, similar to how "this spells trouble" tends to stay present-tense regardless of when the underlying situation actually developed. The related noun "stink" also appears in the fixed idiom "raise a stink," meaning to complain loudly or make a fuss, a usage that has nothing to do with actual odor but borrows the word's inherently negative, attention-grabbing connotation.
Across the tense system
In the perfect tense, only "stunk" is correct regardless of dialect — "the basement has stunk of mildew for years" — so, as with "spring," the actual dialectal dispute is confined entirely to the simple-past slot, while the participle itself is uncontested across all varieties of English. The figurative sense ("the plan has stunk since day one") behaves identically in the perfect tense, treating a poor idea or bad situation the same grammatically as a genuinely unpleasant smell, right down to sharing the exact same irregular participle.
Common real mistakes
The most consequential error by traditional standards is using "stunk" as the simple past in formal writing ("the milk stunk" instead of the traditionally preferred "the milk stank") — a shift that's become common in casual and journalistic prose even though careful copyeditors still flag it. A less frequent slip is "stinked," an overregularization confined almost entirely to early learner English rather than adult prose. A third error, seen in casual movie reviews and social media, is using "stunk" as an adjective before a noun ("a stunk performance"), a construction no dictionary supports; the correct adjectival form in that slot is either the base verb in a relative clause ("a performance that stunk") or a different adjective like "terrible" entirely.
Examples
- The gym bag stank of old sweat and rubber.
- This plan has stunk from the very beginning.
- The fish stank so badly they threw it out immediately.
- Something stinks about the way this contract was written.
- The basement has stunk of mildew ever since the flood.
- His excuse stank, and everyone in the room knew it.
Memory trick
Pair it with its close relative "drink/drank/drunk": both keep a full three-way vowel split in careful, formal writing, even though casual speech is increasingly collapsing both verbs down to just two forms. If you'd hold the line on "drank" in a formal sentence, hold the same line on "stank."