Driving back from the airport this weekend after our vacation, I put on an
audio CD for the kids, one of the
Horrid
Henry stories. In part of the story, he was said to have "sneaked" into a
room. Sneaked? Surely he "snuck" into the room, I thought. But then I lost
confidence. Have I been saying "snuck" all these years by mistake?
To reassure myself, I quickly tried to think of other irregular verbs ending
in -eak where I would do this. I couldn’t think of any. Instead, I thought of
examples where I don’t do this. For example, I wouldn’t say:
- cruck rather than creaked
- fruck rather than freaked
- wruck rather than wreaked
So how on earth did I come to believe that it was snuck rather than sneaked?
AskOxford told
me that I wasn’t alone and that it was an American form that has grown
popular. Common Errors In
English agreed but warned I’d be safer sticking with "sneaked."
Random House’s The Mavens’ Word Of The Day left me most reassured about
snuck. It
wrote comprehensively about how usage had changed, how it is indeed unusual
as a -eak verb to have a -uck form and why no one should feel "snuck" is
non-standard for American English
Interestedly, Francesca Simon –
who writes the Horrid Henry books — is an American who grew up in California
(like me) who lives in the UK (like me). So why didn’t she use "snuck" rather
than "sneaked?" No idea, but since her British books use British spellings, I’m
guessing "sneaked" won out over here.
While discovering why I use "snuck," I also learned it was both a past tense
and past participle for sneak. And what was the difference between "past tense"
and "past participle" again?
Yeah, here I am an English major asking about this. Cut me some slack.
English majors don’t take lessons in grammar. You know how we relearn
grammatical forms we’ve long forgotten since elementary school? We study a
foreign language! That’s why I have on my shelf my trusty copy of
English Grammar For
Students Of German.
Rather than reach for that, however, I first did a little web searching. A
lot of what I found explained how a past participle was formed but not what it
was in terms of when you use it.
In other words, plenty of pages told me that a past participle is usually a
verb with -ed added as a suffix, except for irregular verbs. Great, but what’s
the difference between that and the past tense in terms of usage, not in terms
of how you make the verb form?
OK, this page
had a good definition of past tense: an action that was both started and
finished in the past. The verb form to show this usually ends in -ed, so:
- The race ended.
- The car stalled.
What about the past participle? That same page indirectly explains this is a
verb form usually ending in -ed and with a helper or auxiliary verb that is used
to represent the various
perfect tenses,
such as:
- Present Perfect Tense: An action that happened in the past at an
indefinite time or began in the past and continues into the present.
- The race has ended.
- The race has ended.
- Past Perfect Tense: An action that happened in the past before
another past action.
- The race had ended, and the awards were given out.
- The race had ended, and the awards were given out.
- Future Perfect Tense: An action in the future that will happen
before another future action.
- The race will have ended before the awards will be given out.
So to bring it back to sneak, if you consider it to be a regular verb, you
use -ed as the suffix for the past tense and the -ed suffix with a helper verb
to make the past participle form used for the perfect tenses. Examples show it
better:
- He sneaked into the room. (past tense)
- He has sneaked into the room. (present perfect tense)
- He had sneaked into the room, and then he was caught. (past perfect tense)
- He will have sneaked into the room, before stealing the money. (present
perfect tense)
If you are like me and prefer to treat sneaked as a irregular verb, then
forget that -ed suffix and use snuck:
- He snuck into the room. (past tense)
- He has snuck into the room. (present perfect tense)
- He had snuck into the room, and then he was caught. (past perfect tense)
- He will have snuck into the room, before stealing the money. (present
perfect tense)
Isn’t grammar fun? No doubt, if I’ve got it wrong, folks will leave comments
below.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
AP style guide says…sneaked is “preferred as past tense of sneak. Do not use the colloquial snuck.” American? British? Don’t know. I’m just sticking with AP.
Wow, Pamela — my AP guide doesn’t have anything on it at all! My mine’s the 1980 copyright edition, so it’s a bit out of date
Thank you so much for the info and explanation - I was completely stuck on this with a paper I’m writing. I finally get it!!
One of my favorite rants - thanks for posting. I think there should be a revision of the declension, to wit: “sneak, snack, snuck” … ho-ho.
My ears and brain are annoyed every time I hear “snuck”. Have you thought about a word much like it with only one letter change? It is also a word I definitely abhor. Sneaked sounds right to me, but then I am not a native Californian and certainly not a Southern Californian. A native Califronian told me to just”get over it”. I don’t think I will. I have lived in california for nearly 30 years, and I hope to retain my English grammar sensibilities.
“He will have sneaked into the room, before stealing the money. (present perfect tense)”
I believe this should read…
“He will have sneaked into the room, before stealing the money. (future perfect tense)”
In case you’re interested, you say above, “Past Perfect Tense: An action that happened in the past before another past action”, and that’s RIGHT.
“The race had ended, and the awards were given out”, is WRONG. Right is, “The race ended and the awards were given out”.
“Call me a taxi”. “O.K., you’re a taxi.” The past perfect doesn’t work that way. You can’t make it work by putting ‘had’ in front of a past tense verb.
Let me know if you don’t know why I said what I said.
I don’t talk so good myself sometimes.
Somebody, somewhere, sometime, will get a kick out of that.
…and another thing: you wrote “…if I’ve got it wrong…”. You are saying then (without the contraction) “…if I have got it wrong…”. I believe the preferred way should be “if I have it wrong”, or even could be “if I got it wrong” OR “if I have GOTTEN it wrong”. Just like “you’ve got mail”. You HAVE mail, you don’t HAVE GOT mail.
And that’s MY little abhor-ation.
The work snuk is like fingernails on a blackboard to me !
That is the thing I was taught in grade school it was snuck not sneaked. Is that not wierd! I just saw sneaked on one of my kids TV shows and thought it was wrong and googled it to find out I am the one that was wrong. I should have known better being proficient in two foreign languages that it did not make any sense my way! I guess you learn something new everyday!
I realize snuck does not follow the rules of the english language, but since when is there not an exception to nearly every rule in the english language. I like snuck.
“Snuck” sounds right to me. “Sneaked” is ridiculous.