Past tense of mistake
irregular verb
The past tense of mistake is mistook. The past participle is mistaken.
Forms of mistake
| Base form (V1) | mistake /mɪˈsteɪk/ |
|---|---|
| Past tense (V2) | mistook /mɪsˈtʊk/ |
| Past participle (V3) | mistaken /mɪˈsteɪkn̩/ |
| Present participle | mistaking |
| Third person singular | mistakes /mɪˈsteɪks/ |
Mistook and mistaken in a sentence
- Sorry, I mistook you for my brother. You look very similar.
- The statement also recognised that Eta’s “mistakes or mistaken decisions” had led to the deaths of people who had nothing to do with the conflict, both in the Basque country and beyond.2018 April 20, Sam Jones, “'We are truly sorry': Eta apologises for four decades of deadly violence”, in The Guardian, →ISSN, archived from...
- The journalist mistook the self-propelled artillery vehicle for a tank.From the entry tank
- They saw the light near the cape, which they mistook that night for a lighthouse, although it is in fact a light buoy.From the entry light buoy
- Maybe they mistook the cool stony outdoorsiness of it for unwashed clothes.2016, A.F. Harrold, “Tuesday”, in The Song from Somewhere Else, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, →ISBN, page 43. From the entry outdoorsiness
Meaning of mistake
- verb To understand wrongly, taking one thing or person for another.
- verb To misunderstand (someone).
- verb To commit an unintentional error; to do or think something wrong.
Verbs like mistake
Questions about the past tense of mistake
- What is the past tense of mistake?
- The past tense of mistake is mistook.
- What is the past participle of mistake?
- The past participle of mistake is mistaken.
- Is mistake a regular or irregular verb?
- Mistake is an irregular verb: its past tense is not formed with -ed.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mistake (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.
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Cite this page: “Past tense of mistake.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/past-tense/mistake. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.