Use Stunk or Stank Properly
So you said stunk and someone made a face at you! Should you have said stank? Oh dear, what's the difference? The past tense of stink can be rather confusing. Read on to become an expert on this question.
Steps
- Remember that stank is the past form. Use it when you refer to a finished time, such as last night, yesterday, etc. stunk is the participle form (okay, never mind that word), but it means you use it with have, has, or had. These sentences are correct:
- She sure stank up the kitchen last night with that burned milk!
- I'm sorry, but the baby's diaper really stank on the way home yesterday!
- The house hasn't stunk this badly since the day we found that rat behind the dryer.
- If you hadn't stunk up the bathroom, I wouldn't have opened the window and let your orchids freeze in the snow.
- Remember that stink (stank - stunk) is what is called an irregular verb. That means it doesn't have an -ed at the end (like live - lived - lived). It's like this verb: drink - drank - drunk.
- Don't worry about using the word like this: "You're sure making a big stink about nothing!". That's not your problem. (It's a noun here.)
- Don't worry about using the word like this: "I can't stand that stinking tree in front of the window anymore". That's also not your problem. (It's an adjective here.)
- Think about the word when you want to make a sentence like this: "You really stunk at checkers last night." That's wrong. It should be stank.
- Think about the word when you want to make a sentence like this: "She hasn't stank that badly since you bought her that cheap perfume." That's wrong. It should be stunk.
Tips
- Sink-sank-sunk and shrink-shrank-shrunk work exactly like stink-stank-stunk.
- Remember that stink-stank-stunk is like drink-drank-drunk. You wouldn't say, "He drunk too much last night", or "Have you drank all that medicine?", at least not if you speak standard literate English.
- To check if you are using the word correctly, you can look in a dictionary at the sample sentence given (hopefully) after the definition, and see if your sentence looks the same.
- Note that Ebonics is considered a separate dialect of English by some linguists: these guidelines on the usage of the word stink-stank-stunk are not to be applied to urban usages of the word.
- You could check in a grammar or writing reference handbook from one of your writing classes, and probably find the word in the index. Look up the page and you should see some correct sample sentences.
- Use a synonym if it's too hard to remember when is the proper time to use stank instead of stunk or vice versa.
- You can always just forget it and replace the word instead. For example, instead of "The house hasn't stunk this badly since the day we found that rat behind the dryer," you can say, "The house hasn't smelled this bad since the day we found that rat behind the dryer."
- You could type your phrase into a Microsoft Word document, turn on the grammar check function, and see if you get a green underline. That would also tell you it's wrong.
- These guidelines on the usage of the word stink-stank-stunk are not to be applied to urban usages of the word, such as:
- "Girl, you iz stinky."
- "Girl iz such a nasty stank-ho lately, what is her problem?"
- "That stank bitch just cussed my mama out!"
- "Damn, Julio, that bidge is stank! Stay away from her."
- Remember you can decide how you want to sound in English, how educated, how sophisticated, how relaxed. If you don't care, then which word you use doesn't matter. But if you are writing at work, school, professionally, or are simply trying to sound correct, then you really need to learn the difference between stank and stunk.
- You can do a search of your phrase (such as "she stunk") on Google, with the quotation marks, and see what comes up. You might quickly find places that tell you this is wrong.
- Be sure that your spell checker is not mis-identifying the word skank for stank.
