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So to start things off, I know that the proper past tense of the word arrive would be the word arrived.

And that sounds fine for me if you are singularly referring to yourself, such as:

I have arrived at my home.

But when I try to use the word to refer to a group of people, such as:

We have arrived at our home.

It just peeves me for some reason. It feels more natural to say:

We arrove at our home.

Or even:

We have arriven at our home.

They both feel far more natural to me than arrived does for some reason. Wiktionary lists arrove as a non-standard alternative to arrived, which indicates that at least some other people have felt the same way. How frequently are arrove or arriven used? What region(s) does this dialect belong to?

Me from the future: To anyone interested, I have discovered that Google Docs recognizes 'arriven' as a word but not 'arrove'

SemperAmbroscus
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    Have you checked a dictionary? That's a good first step. – fixer1234 Apr 12 '17 at 22:47
  • @fixer1234 yes I did a bit of digging and didn't find a single occurrence of the words arrove and arriven. But I didn't exclude the possibility that they are rather archaic or belong to a specific dialect and therefore they didn't turn up in my searches. – SemperAmbroscus Apr 12 '17 at 22:50
  • "have arrove" seems doubly strange to me because I can't even think of a verb that ends in "ive" in the plain form and "ove" in the past participle. Maybe "dive" for some people? Anyway, "arrove" or "arriven" are just analogical re-formations. I think any educated speaker would agree that they are non-standard, but nobody is in a unique position to say they are "valid" or "invalid." So I'm voting to close this as primarily opinion-based. – herisson Apr 12 '17 at 22:57
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    @sumelic it isn't that the question is opinion based, I merely used the wrong word. Rather than questioning the validity of the words I actually meant to ask about the frequency of usage (if at all). – SemperAmbroscus Apr 12 '17 at 23:02
  • @sumelic and yes, it primarily because of words like dove exist that arrove sounds natural to me, so more than likely it is an issue of dialect. – SemperAmbroscus Apr 12 '17 at 23:05
  • Try Google Ngram. – Xanne Apr 12 '17 at 23:15
  • @Xanne Well that's neat! I never knew such a thing existed, sadly either the terms arrove and arriven never made an appearance in books or the words truly are never spoken. – SemperAmbroscus Apr 12 '17 at 23:18
  • @Xanne I stand corrected, I was doing a comparison between arrived, arrove, and arriven and due to arrived being so vastly more common the other two effectively became negligible, well consider this question closed. – SemperAmbroscus Apr 12 '17 at 23:22
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    As sumelic indirectly said, you’re conflating past tense and past participle. The past tense is “we arrived [drove]”; the past participle is used to form the perfect tense “we have arrived [driven]”. It sounds like you speak a dialect where the two are not usually distinguished in strong verbs, since you seem to find “we have arrove” more natural than “we have arriven”. I suspect that even if this is the case, you would not say “I have was” but “I have been”. (Also note that Google Ngrams is a search corpus for published books and says nothing at all about speech.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 12 '17 at 23:27
  • @sumelic “Have arrove” seems about one-and-a-halfly strange to me for the same reason, but there are a fair few lects, especially in AmE, where past tense and past participle have generally coalesced in most strong verbs too. I’ve heard plenty of people say “I have gave” or “I have went” or “I have tore”, so while “I have arrove” has two odd things about it, one of them is at least recognisable as adhering to a pattern (and the other as trying to find a pattern to adhere to). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 12 '17 at 23:31
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    I don't know if the existence of the Google Ngram viewer means this question should be considered closed. It is a useful tool, but maybe you could edit the question to also ask about the geographical distribution of these forms. As far as I know, the Ngram Viewer can only show differences between US and British usage in its corpora; it can't show any more finely grained regional differences or, as Janus Bahs Jacquet said, spoken frequency. – herisson Apr 12 '17 at 23:31
  • @SemperAmbroscus I don’t think so. Be is, as far as I know, not part of this merger anywhere. I don’t recall hearing anyone say “I have did”, either, but I may have. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 12 '17 at 23:32
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: "Be" and "done" are I believe often leveled in favor of the past-participle form: "I been" and "I done it." There may be specialized meanings to the use of past-participle or preterite form for the finite past tense (e.g. I think "I been" contrasts with "I was" in (some forms of?) AAVE, and I think I've heard of a lexical verb/auxiliary contrast between "I done" and "I did": even people who say "I done it" will say "Did you do it?"). – herisson Apr 12 '17 at 23:34
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    @sumelic That’s true, but I think that’s a different levelling. Go is frequently levelled either way (“I have went” ~ “I gone”), and instinctively to me those two feel like they belong to different types of speech. I may be mistaken there, though. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 12 '17 at 23:36
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    The Ngram for arrove and arriven shows much more common use pre-1900, then a sharp drop-off, with arrove far more common than arriven. "We arrove" is beginning to sound natural to me. I agree it's only one tool; but you can look at the specific texts. – Xanne Apr 12 '17 at 23:43
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    I have heard of "arriven" ... a high-school classmate of mine told me that it felt right to him, but he now knew it was wrong, so no longer used it. – GEdgar Apr 12 '17 at 23:54
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    On Ngram sources: turns out "arrove" is also a weight measure. Also that it's used as the past participle; "has arrove", "is arrove." – Xanne Apr 13 '17 at 00:00
  • If you have to ask, you shouldn't use either. Really, even if you don't have to ask, you shouldn't use either unless you're writing some arcane poetry and really need them for a rhyme. – Kevin Apr 13 '17 at 03:44
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    Your problem is that English as a language is very irregular, mainly because it's an agglutination of multiple different languages with different rules. As someone with a young child, I regularly correct "goed" to "went", "gived" to "gave", "throwed" to "threw", and so on. Unfortunately if you want to communicate with another English speaker then you need to speak English. In your favour is that English has many dialects, so English speakers are relatively insensitive to grammatical flaws, but you cannot expect to invent your own personal dialect and have it readily understood. :) – Graham Apr 13 '17 at 11:57
  • You're just expecting 'arrive' to work like the much more common 'drive', an easy (non-standard) alternative to make. – Mitch Apr 13 '17 at 20:58
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    @Graham I think you're missing that the asker here is actually a native speaker of English—and that every single person on the planet essentially has their own personal dialect (it's called their idiolect) and are generally quite readily understood. The problem here is the reverse your child’s: children in general use as regular forms as possible because systems tend to come before individual irregularities; here the asker is using an irregular form instead of a regular one. (I also feel like agglomeration would be a better word than agglutination here, but that may just be me.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 14 '17 at 00:20
  • @JanusBahsJacquet You're right that I'm missing that, because it didn't seem to me that this was something a native speaker would ask. Of course we have our own personal dialect as a combination of dialects we've been exposed to, but the question asks about a structure which is not part of any regular English dialect the asker has personally heard. That makes it curious that they'd latch onto irregular forms (albeit ones which do recur) as the "regular" form. – Graham Apr 18 '17 at 10:03
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    @Graham Not so very curious—that's how dove as the past tense of dive arose, and that eventually made its way into many English dialects. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 18 '17 at 10:25

5 Answers5

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Historical

According to OED, these forms did exist (not necessarily with your spelling), as it mentions in its entry for arrive (v):

In 14–15th cent. occas. aphetized to rive; and inflected after strong verbs, with past tense arove (rove, arofe), past participle ariven (aryven).

This is historical (so I'm not sure why Wiktionary lists arrove).

OED gives this example:

His nauye greate..In Thamis aroue.
1470 J. Hardyng Chron. xlii

The Middle English Dictionary gives other examples:

Ascalus & Alacus auntrid to lond, And aryuen full rad with þere rank shippes.
c1540(?a1400) Destr.Troy (Htrn 388) 5792

But he ne koude arryuen in no coost Where as he myghte fynde..Two creatures acordyng in feere.
(c1395) Chaucer CT.WB.(Manly-Rickert)

The 1830 Book of Mormon uses "arriven" at least four times, e.g:

And again: They were wroth with him, when they had arriven to the promised land, because they said that he had taken the ruling of the people out of their hands; and they sought to kill him.

Dialects

"Up-State New York":

Arrove for arrived appears to be an analogous form based on some word like dive-dove.
The Dialect of Up-State New York: A Study of the Folk-Speech in Two Works of Marietta Holley

Smokey Mountain English:

Irregular verbs may be treated as regular verbs and vice versa, or they may be treated as irregular in a different way from more general dialects (arrove, blowed, costed).
American English

Laurel
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    +1, but neither of your two MED citations is a past participle: the first is a plural simple past and the second is an infinitive. The reduction to rive is significant: rove and riven are the past and past participle of rive, so there's extra pressure for analogical regularization there. – StoneyB on hiatus Apr 13 '17 at 00:38
  • I thought "arrove" sounded normal. I grew up in up-state New York. :-) – fixer1234 May 07 '17 at 04:26
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Historical Linguistics: An Introduction by Lyle Campbell (MIT Press, 2013) (originally published in 1988) suggests these forms are developing or are naturally generated:

Analogical extension (somewhat rarer than analogical levelling) extends the already existing alternation of some pattern to new forms which did not formerly undergo the alternation. An example of analogical extension is seen in the case mentioned above of dived being replaced by dove on analogy with the 'strong' verb pattern as in drive/drove, ride/rode and so on, an extension of the alternating pattern of the strong verbs. Other examples follow.

(I) Modern English wear/wore, which is now in the strong verb pattern, was historically a weak verb which changed by extension of the strong verb pattern, as seen in earlier English werede ' wore', which would have become modem weared if it had survived.

(2) Other examples in English include the development of the nonstandard past tense forms which show extension to the strong verb pattern which creates alternations that formerly were not there, as in: arrive/arrove (Standard English arrive/arrived), and squeeze/squoze (Standard squeeze/squeezed).

Community
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Xanne
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    Certainly where I live (Northern England), 'Squoze' is in fairly common usage, although I suspect this is more of a cute colloquialism, rather than realising it might actually be correct. – Neil Apr 13 '17 at 11:35
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They used to be more popular than they are now (but "arrived" has always been at least 100x as common).

enter image description here

Hot Licks
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  • Thanks for the graph--how did you get it copied/posted? – Xanne Apr 13 '17 at 00:30
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    I copied it pixel by pixel. (PrtSc + Paint + a lot of cursing) – Hot Licks Apr 13 '17 at 00:40
  • Save to file, then use the file in your answer. – Hot Licks Apr 13 '17 at 00:45
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    I'm looking at the ngrams and "arrived" isn't just 100x more popular, it's closer to 100,000x for most of the duration, and the closest I see is 1870, where it's almost 10,000x. Both of the "alternates" are a rounding error at best. – Kevin Apr 13 '17 at 03:37
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    @Kevin - Yeah, I didn't try to work it out, but when I added "arrived" to the chart the other words tuned into flat lines on the bottom axis. But the words are common enough to not be simply OCR errors and the like. – Hot Licks Apr 13 '17 at 11:53
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Raised in Wisconsin, I use "arrove" and "arriven", regularly. I think probably by analogy with dive/dove, drive/drove, ride/rode, but, regardless, "arrived" sounds unnatural, especially for the simple past/preterite...

תומר
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In a diary entry from 1980, when I was 17, admittedly writing only for myself and being deliberately archaic, I wrote, "The big day hath arriven, and beginneth like unto a fizzle." Context: long-planned outing, unexpected change of plans. My family is from north-central Ohio, and I do say "worsh", "crick", and "red up the table", and say "thuh" before consonants and "thee" before vowels. I can't say I ever heard anyone say "arrove" or "arriven".

Dr. D.
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  • Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. – Community Jan 29 '23 at 03:19
  • This personal anecdote does not really answer the question. When you emphasize that n=1 in your personal writing, it's more of a comment. 1980 was not seeing common usage like this. Please see the helpful [help] and take the site [tour]. – livresque Jan 29 '23 at 03:22