Past tense of impale
regular verb
The past tense of impale is impaled. The past participle is also impaled.
Forms of impale
| Base form (V1) | impale /ɪmˈpeɪl/ |
|---|---|
| Past tense (V2) | impaled /ɪmˈpeɪld/ |
| Past participle (V3) | impaled /ɪmˈpeɪld/ |
| Present participle | impaling /ɪmˈpeɪlɪŋ/ |
| Third person singular | impales /ɪmˈpeɪlz/ |
Impaled in a sentence
- They adorned the towns with avenues of gibbets, the burnt villages with pyramids of heads and the roadsides with impaled corpses.2013, Patrick Leigh Fermor, “A Hanging Glass Box”, in Colin Thubron, Artemis Cooper, editors, The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to…. From the entry bashi-bazouk
- A hasped door engraved with a bear that seems impaled on the cross carved behind it leads into the church.2008, Craig Chalquist, Deep California. From the entry hasped
- Many as were her gifts, she was, this minute, impaled on the lack of one – she was not clairvoyante.1964, Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls, London: Jonathan Cape […], page 92. From the entry clairvoyante
- Thus was he impaled on the horns of a dilemma.1902, Basil Thomson, “Westward Ho!”, in Savage Island: An Account of a Sojourn in Niué and Tonga, London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, pages…. From the entry on the horns of a dilemma
- His arms show the crancelin of Saxony impaled with the crossed swords of the Marshalcy of the Empire which went with the Saxon Electorate.1991, Jiří Louda, Michael Maclagan, Lines of Succession, page 204. From the entry crancelin
Meaning of impale
- verb To pierce (something) with any long, pointed object.
- verb To place two coats of arms side by side on the same shield (often those of two spouses upon marriage).
- verb To pierce with a pale; to put to death by fixing on a sharp stake.
Questions about the past tense of impale
- What is the past tense of impale?
- The past tense of impale is impaled.
- What is the past participle of impale?
- The past participle of impale is impaled.
- Is impale a regular or irregular verb?
- Impale is a regular verb: its past tense adds -d.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: impale (page history and authors) and the entries of its forms. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws left out forms marked obsolete, archaic, rare or dialectal and added the examples. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this page: “Past tense of impale.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/past-tense/impale. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.