Past Tense of “take”
The past tense of take is took; the past participle is taken.
Why “take” behaves this way
"Take" was borrowed into English from Old Norse "taka" during the Viking settlement period, gradually displacing the native Old English verb "niman" (which survives today only in the related word "nimble," originally meaning "quick to take/grasp"). As a strong verb, "take" kept an ablaut-style vowel pattern (take/took/taken) once it was absorbed into English grammar, following the same general a-vowel-to-oo-vowel-to-a-vowel-plus-n pattern seen in verbs like "shake/shook/shaken" and "forsake/forsook/forsaken."
The replacement of "niman" by the Norse-derived "take" is one of many everyday-vocabulary swaps that happened in the parts of England most heavily settled by Norse speakers (the Danelaw) — other common Norse borrowings from the same period and region include "sky," "skin," "leg," "window," and the pronoun "they," which is remarkable since pronouns are usually the last part of a language to be replaced by borrowing.
The common confusion
The real confusion with "take" isn't the irregular forms themselves — most speakers get took/taken right instinctively — but take vs. bring, a usage pair genuinely governed by point of view (bring moves something toward the speaker's location; take moves something away from it), covered on its own versus page.
How it's actually used
"Take" anchors an especially large number of fixed collocations with time and effort nouns — "take a while," "take time," "take effort," "take a break," "take a look" — where "take" functions almost like a light, meaning-thin verb whose real content comes from the noun that follows it, a pattern linguists call a "light verb construction," also seen with "make a decision" and "have a look." "Take" combines with a striking range of abstract nouns in fixed collocations that don't literally involve grasping anything — "take a risk," "take offense," "take notice," "take pride" — a pattern so extensive that dictionaries devote entire separate sub-entries just to "take" plus a noun, distinct from its literal physical sense of picking something up.
Across the tense system
"Taken" appears in a distinctive impersonal construction with "it" as a placeholder subject describing duration or effort — "it took three hours," "it has taken years to fix" — where "take" doesn't have a normal human subject doing the taking at all, one of several English verbs (along with "rain" and "seem") that regularly appear with a semantically empty "it" subject.
Common real mistakes
A common error is using "bring" where "take" is called for from the speaker's point of view, or vice versa — "can you bring this to the post office" (said by someone staying put, describing something moving away from them) should actually be "take this to the post office," since "bring" is reserved for movement toward the speaker's own location. Learners also sometimes generalize the shake/took vowel pattern too far, producing nonstandard forms like "taked" by analogy with regular -ed verbs, especially among very early English learners still testing which verbs follow the regular pattern and which don't before they've fully internalized "take" as one of the irregular exceptions. A further mix-up is "take" versus "pass" in the context of exams — English says "take an exam" (to sit for it) but "pass an exam" (to succeed at it), and learners occasionally use "take" where "pass" is meant, producing a sentence that describes only attempting the exam rather than succeeding at it.
Examples
- She took the last train home.
- He has taken every opportunity offered to him.
- We took a shortcut through the park.
- Have you taken your medicine today?
- They had taken the wrong turn twice already.
- It takes about an hour to get there.
- Take your time.
- It's taking longer than expected.
Memory trick
Group "take" with its close relatives "shake" and "forsake" — all three share the identical took/taken-style pattern (shook/shaken, forsook/forsaken) — and remember that "take" itself is a Viking-era import, like "sky" and "leg." And keep exam vocabulary straight: you "take" a test regardless of outcome, but only "pass" describes succeeding at it — two different verbs marking two different stages of the same event. Similarly, "take after" (resemble a relative) is its own fixed idiom, unrelated to any literal sense of grasping or carrying.