Drank or Drunk? The Past Tense of Drink and the Trap of Drunk Meaning Intoxicated

You're doing dictation listening practice on a morning conversation at the office. The speaker lets out a sentence, you write it down as "He drunk two cups before the meeting," and the underline marks exactly one word wrong. The real sentence is "He drank two cups before the meeting." You listen again and the two words still sound almost identical, because they differ by exactly one short vowel sitting between two identical consonant clusters. Quick answer first: the simple past of drink is drank, and the past participle of drink is drunk. The V-ing form is drinking, the third person singular is drinks.

That's the easy part, and you'll find it on every other page. The hard part sits in two places. First, drunk isn't just a participle. It's also a very common adjective meaning intoxicated, and in everyday life that meaning comes up more often than the grammatical one, so "he was drunk" and "he has drunk" say two completely different things. Second, native speakers themselves swap these two forms constantly — they say "I drunk it" and "have you drank" — so what you hear doesn't settle the question of which one is correct in writing.

This article walks through the whole chain: the form table for drink, the i-a-u vowel trio that pulls a whole group of verbs along with it, choosing drank or drunk based on where it sits in the sentence, drunk as an adjective, thirteen common phrases, and — the part that matters most for listening practice — how these two vowels actually sound when native speakers talk at normal speed.

• The form table for drink, and the i, a, u vowel trio
• When to use drank, when to use drunk, and drunk as an adjective
• Hearing drank and drunk in real speech
• Common phrases with drank and drunk
• Mistakes Vietnamese speakers often make with drink
• Quick exercise
• Frequently asked questions

The form table for drink, and the i, a, u vowel trio

Five forms, fit into one table. The phonetic transcription column follows American pronunciation; British pronunciation for this verb is nearly identical.

Form	Word	Transcription	Short example
Base form (V1)	drink	/drɪŋk/	I drink tea at night.
Third person singular	drinks	/drɪŋks/	She drinks it black.
Simple past (V2)	drank	/dræŋk/	He drank two cups.
Past participle (V3)	drunk	/drʌŋk/	We have drunk it all.
Present participle	drinking	/ˈdrɪŋkɪŋ/	They are drinking outside.

Look at the three main forms and you'll see the beginning and the end of the word never change at all. dr at the start, ŋk at the end, and all the work of conjugation piles onto the vowel sitting in the middle: i becomes a becomes u. This isn't unique to drink. It's a pattern that stays intact across a whole group of verbs, and that group is big enough to be worth learning in one go.

sing becomes sang becomes sung. swim becomes swam becomes swum. ring becomes rang becomes rung. begin becomes began becomes begun. sink becomes sank becomes sunk. shrink becomes shrank becomes shrunk. spring becomes sprang becomes sprung. If you read that whole list out loud a few times, you'll hear a three-note melody, and that melody sticks in memory longer than a table does.

One thing needs to be said honestly: this pattern holds firm for drink but is wobbling in a few other spots in the group. For sink and shrink, the forms sunk and shrunk have already crept into the simple-past slot in everyday English, and hardly anyone finds it jarring anymore. For drink, though, drank still holds its slot firmly in all standard writing, and that's exactly why this article is worth reading carefully: this is a verb where getting it wrong still counts as wrong.

There's one more pronunciation detail the transcription table doesn't fully capture. The dr cluster at the start of the word isn't a d sound plus an r sound stuck together. In American pronunciation, it slides toward something close to "jr," so drank comes out sounding like "jraank" and drink comes out sounding like "jrink." A learner waiting for a clear d sound won't find one, and while they're searching for it, the whole sentence has already gone by.

If you're reviewing the whole group of irregular verbs, the three articles alongside this one each take a different angle. The past tense of eat is worth reading right next to this one, since eating and drinking always go together in a sentence, but eat conjugates into ate and eaten, following no three-note melody at all. The past tense of find also changes its middle vowel, but its V2 and V3 are identical — found and found — the opposite of drink, which has three distinct forms. The past tense of ride has all three distinct forms just like drink, but its V3 needs the -en ending tacked on to become ridden, while drunk adds nothing at all. To map out the whole system, go back to the English grammar article.

When to use drank, when to use drunk, and drunk as an adjective

The simplest rule: drank stands alone as the main verb, while drunk always needs have, has, or had in front of it — unless it's functioning as an adjective meaning intoxicated. There's no situation where drunk acts as the main verb of a simple-past sentence on its own.

Sentence	Correct or incorrect	Why
I drank two coffees this morning.	Correct	Simple past, with a clear time marker
I have drank two coffees.	Incorrect	After have, it must be the participle drunk
I have drunk too much coffee today.	Correct	Present perfect, today isn't over yet
He drunk it in one go.	Incorrect	drunk is missing an auxiliary verb; it should be drank
Did you drank the last one?	Incorrect	After did comes the base form drink
He was drunk by nine.	Correct	drunk here is an adjective, meaning intoxicated

What makes this verb trickier than others in its group is that drunk lives two parallel lives. With sing, sung is only a participle, with no other meaning. With drink, drunk is both a participle and an adjective describing the state of being intoxicated, and that second meaning is actually more common in everyday life. The six lines below make that gap clear.

Sentence	Actual meaning
I drank three coffees.	I drank three cups, the matter is closed in the past
I have drunk three coffees today.	Three cups so far, and today isn't over yet
He was drunk.	He was intoxicated. The sentence doesn't say what he drank
He got drunk at the party.	He became intoxicated at some point at the party. get pairs with an adjective to show a change of state
It was a drunken argument.	An argument that happened while drunk. drunken only goes before a noun
All the milk has been drunk.	The milk has all been drunk up. This is passive voice, drunk as a participle

That last line is where a lot of writers steer away. "All the milk has been drunk" is a hundred percent grammatically correct, but because drunk is so tied to the meaning of intoxicated, the sentence reads a bit comically, and native speakers usually rephrase it as "someone has drunk all the milk" or simply "the milk is gone." You don't need to avoid the passive voice — you just need to know why it rarely shows up here.

One more regional difference worth remembering, since it shows up a lot in news writing. American English calls driving while intoxicated drunk driving, British English calls it drink-driving, with drink in its base form and a hyphen. Both spellings are standard within their own region, and you just need to stay consistent within one piece of writing.

So when do you choose drank instead of have drunk? Same as with any other verb: when the sentence has a closed time marker. yesterday, last night, at the party, before the meeting. A marker present means use drank. No marker, and you're talking about a result that still carries into the present — like how much someone has drunk so far today — then use have drunk.

Hearing drank and drunk in real speech

This is the part you won't find in any verb conjugation table, and it's also the part that decides whether you transcribe the sentence correctly. On paper, drank and drunk are clearly different. In sound, they differ only by one short vowel squeezed between two identical consonant clusters.

The entire difference lies in the middle vowel, and these two vowels are easy for a Vietnamese ear to blur together. drank has /æ/, open and toward the front of the mouth, close to the vowel in cat. drunk has /ʌ/, short and central, close to the vowel in cup. Vietnamese has no exact matching contrast before a nasal sound, so an untrained ear tends to fold both into one.

The dr cluster at the start doesn't give you a clear d sound. In American pronunciation, drank comes out close to "jraank" and drunk comes out close to "jrunk." If you're listening for a /d/ sound, you're listening for something that isn't there, and by the time you're still searching, the whole sentence has already gone by.

The final /k/ doesn't release when the next word starts with a consonant. "drank coffee" comes out as "drang-kof-fi" with just one tongue closure, "drunk milk" comes out as "drung-milk". You hear one solid block, not two words, and the tail of the verb melts into the word after it.

Before a vowel, /k/ jumps over to the next word and spawns a strange new syllable. "drunk enough" comes out as "drung-kə-nəf". The learner hears three beats where on paper there are only two words, then cuts the join in the wrong place and writes down a completely different sentence.

have and has before drunk contract down to a single /v/ or /z/ sound. "We have drunk all the milk" in real speech is "we've drunk", and the 've part is just a /v/ stuck onto the end of the subject. Miss that bit and you write down "we drunk all the milk" — exactly the wrong form that plenty of native speakers also say out loud.

drink and drank are both short, both closed off with /ŋk/. In a fast-running sentence, the gap between the present and past tense of this verb comes down to a single short vowel. The more reliable clue sits in the time adverbial in the sentence, and that's where you should point your ear when you're not sure.

Below are correct sentences of the kind that show up in listening material, along with how they actually sound and the mistakes learners commonly write down. The middle column is written the way it sounds, not standard phonetic transcription.

Real sentence	Sounds like	Learners often write it as
I drank it on the way here.	ai jraan-kit on the way hia	I drink it on the way here.
We've drunk all the milk.	wiv drung-kol the milk	We drunk all the milk.
He drank too much last night.	hi jraank tu mơch last nait	He drunk too much last night.
She was drunk before dinner.	shi wơz drunk bi-for din-nơ	She was drank before dinner.
Have you drunk enough water?	hav yu drung-kơ-nơf wo-dơ	Have you drank enough water?
They drink at that bar on Fridays.	they jrin-kat that bar...	They drank at that bar on Fridays.

Look at the third column and you'll see the mistakes fall into three very clear types. Lines one, three and six are pure vowel errors: the consonant frame of the word is heard correctly, but the vowel that carries the tense information gets assigned to the wrong slot. Line two is a dropped function word — the 've part falls out of the sentence and takes the perfect tense with it. Line five is a form-selection error driven by habit — the ear hears drunk but the hand writes drank because that form feels more familiar. These three types need three different fixes, and you have to know which type you're dealing with before you can fix it.

That chain shows up very clearly in a dictation session on WELE. You listen to a sentence, write down exactly what your ear caught, and then the grading points straight at the word you got wrong. When the word marked wrong is drank and you wrote drunk, you get a piece of information that reading a verb-conjugation table never gives you: your consonant frame is fine, what's broken is a short vowel sitting in the middle. You listen to that same sentence again, this time knowing exactly where to point your ear instead of listening to the whole sentence over again in some generic way.

It's exactly at the moment of fixing the mistake that the word sticks in memory. Read through the five-line table at the top of the article, and ten minutes later you can still recite drink, drank, drunk by heart — but your ear hasn't changed at all. Write a sentence wrong and then hear exactly where you went wrong, and the next time you meet it, your ear already has a landmark in place. For drink, the landmark most worth building is the pair "he drank" versus "he's drunk", because those two sentences differ in both tense and meaning.

If you want to understand why these sounds disappear rather than assume you're just bad at listening, the article on connected speech explains the mechanics of sound-dropping and linking across a whole sentence, not just for drank. And if you want to try it right away on real sentences, the podcast library comes with transcripts to check against after each dictation, and everyday conversation episodes are where drank and drunk turn up most densely.

Common combinations with drank and drunk

drink has a handful of genuine phrasal verbs and a lot of set combinations, most of them built around meeting up and offering drinks. The most frequent combinations are in the thirteen rows below, given in their past or participle form.

Phrase or combination	Meaning	Example
drink up	Finish your drink, usually as a prompt	We drank up and left before the rain.
drink to	Raise a glass to someone or something	They drank to the new office.
drink in	Take in, feast your eyes on. Figurative	She stood there and drank in the view.
drink away	Drink to forget, or drink your money away	He drank away most of his savings.
have a drink	Have a drink	We had a drink after work on Friday.
go for a drink	Go out for a drink, usually as an invitation	They went for a drink with the new intern.
buy someone a drink	Buy someone a drink	He bought me a drink to say thanks.
a soft drink	Soft drink, non-alcoholic	The kids drank soft drinks all afternoon.
drink and drive	Drink and drive	Nobody drank and drove that night.
drunk driving	Driving while drunk. British English uses drink-driving	He was fined for drunk driving last year.
get drunk	Get drunk	They got drunk on cheap wine and sang badly.
drink like a fish	Drink like a fish	He drank like a fish in his twenties.
drinking water	Water that's safe to drink. Compound noun	The village had no clean drinking water.

There's a cultural detail behind half of this table. When drink is a noun and comes with an article, "a drink" in a social context defaults to meaning an alcoholic drink. "Let us have a drink after work" is not an invitation to plain water. If you want to make clear it's non-alcoholic, you need to add a word: a soft drink, a coffee, something non-alcoholic.

The drinking water line is also worth pausing on, because it isn't a verb there. Here drinking is a compound adjective, meaning used for drinking, the same way people say drinking glass or drinking fountain. Whereas in "they are drinking water", drinking is a verb. Same string of sounds, and what splits the two meanings is the word in front of it, not the word itself.

Mistakes Vietnamese learners commonly make with drink

drinked and dranked. This is the reflex of adding -ed to every verb, and dranked is a half-hearted patch job for when you remember drank but still feel like something's missing. drink never conjugates by the regular rule. There's only drank and drunk, no other form.

Did you drank it. Because did already marks the past, the verb after it goes back to the base form. The correct sentence is "Did you drink it." This mistake tends to show up right when you're focused on remembering that the past tense of drink is drank — and remembering it too well.

I drunk it. This sentence is non-standard, and what's worth noting is that you'll hear it a great deal from native speakers — in films, in podcasts, in everyday speech across many regions. Hearing it out in the world isn't enough to make it usable. In an exam, in a work email, in any piece of writing, "I drunk it" counts as wrong. The correct sentence is "I drank it" if there's a past-time marker, or "I have drunk it" if you're talking about a result that carries through to the present.

Have you drank enough. This is the mirror image of the mistake above, and it's just as common among native speakers. After have, has, had, the form must be drunk. The correct sentence is "Have you drunk enough water." These two mistakes come as a pair because the speaker feels the two forms are interchangeable, while standard written English does not allow that.

He was drank. After be, the form denoting the state of being drunk is always drunk. "He was drunk" is correct, "He was drank" is wrong and sounds very off. This needs to be distinguished from the passive: "The milk was drunk by the kids" also uses drunk, but there it's the participle — and although this sentence is grammatically correct, it's rarely used because it's easy to misread.

drunk versus drunken. These two words mean the same thing but don't sit in the same position. drunken only goes before a noun: a drunken argument, a drunken night. drunk goes after be and linking verbs: he is drunk, he got drunk. You'll also come across "a drunk driver" a great deal, and it's completely standard, but "he is drunken" is not usable.

Quick exercise

Eight sentences — fill in drink, drank, or drunk. Finish the whole exercise first; the answers are revealed at the end.

1. I ______ two coffees before the meeting this morning.
2. Have you ______ enough water today?
3. Did you ______ anything at the party?
4. He was ______ by nine and went home in a taxi.
5. We have ______ all the milk again.
6. They ______ to the new office and then went home.
7. She ______ her tea slowly while reading the report.
8. Nobody ______ and drove that night.

Answers: 1. drank. 2. drunk. 3. drink. 4. drunk. 5. drunk. 6. drank. 7. drank. 8. drank.

Sentences 2 and 5 are the two worth lingering on the longest, because they're exactly the pair of mistakes both learners and native speakers tend to make. Both have have or has right before the blank, so drunk is mandatory, even if your ear is used to hearing drank in that spot. Sentence 3 traps you a different way: did comes before it, so the verb goes back to the base form, even though the whole sentence means past time. If you got these three wrong, the right/wrong table in the middle of the article is worth reading through again.

Frequently asked questions

What's the past tense of drink?

The simple past of drink is drank, the past participle is drunk. drank works as the main verb in a simple past sentence, while drunk always follows have, has, or had, or stands alone as an adjective meaning intoxicated.

Drank or drunk, which one do you use?

The way to tell them apart is to check whether there's an auxiliary verb in front. If there's have, has, had, use drunk. If there's nothing in front, use drank. "I drank it" is correct, "I have drunk it" is correct, "I have drank it" is wrong, "I drunk it" is wrong.

Why do so many native speakers still say I drunk it?

Because in everyday speech, these two forms have merged in many regions, and the whole i-a-u verb group is under the same pressure, most visible in sink and shrink. That doesn't mean you get to write it that way. In exams and in workplace writing, drank and drunk still keep their own separate slots.

Does drunk mean intoxicated or does it mean "have drunk"?

Both, and you tell them apart by sentence structure. After have, has, had, drunk is a participle, meaning "have drunk." After be, get, look, seem, drunk is an adjective, meaning intoxicated. "He has drunk two glasses" and "He is drunk" use the same word for two completely different things.

What's the difference between drunk and drunken?

They mean roughly the same thing but sit in different places. drunken only goes before a noun, as in a drunken argument. drunk goes after be and linking verbs, as in he got drunk. The phrase a drunk driver is also standard and common, while he is drunken is not usable.

How much listening does it take to tell drank and drunk apart in fast speech?

The rules part takes one sitting to finish. The ear part depends on your current listening foundation, and the most realistic way to measure it is to transcribe a few conversations and count how many times you miss that exact middle vowel. Before you practice, the listening level test tells you where you stand, and a few weeks later you measure again.

You can read through the table of drink's forms in twenty seconds, and that's the easiest part of this page. The rest — the fact that one short vowel decides which tense a sentence is in, and the fact that drunk is both a participle and an adjective — only really sinks in once you've misheard it and then seen where you transcribed it wrong. Pick a short clip and try dictation practice on a passage with drank or drunk in it, then go back to the table at the top of the article and see if it still looks dry to you.