I heard this the other day.

Problem:
The speaker used the preterite where the past participle was required.

Explanation:
I do not remember the complete sentence, but it was something along the lines of “I had ran into him at the grocery store.”

It does not matter that the speaker used “had”; using “have” instead would not have solved the problem.

Other similar mistakes include “had gave” and “have drove”.

The verb “run” has these basic forms:

• Run — present simple, as in “Can you run a marathon?”
• Ran — preterite, as in “My wife ran a half-marathon yesterday.”
• Run — past participle, as in “They have run out of things to say.” or “They had run the engine for three minutes before it died.”
• Running — present continuous, as in “The engine is not running.”

The frequency of this mistake — using a preterite where a past participle is required — seems to be increasing.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “had run” — 3,360,000 matches
• “had ran” — 160,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “had run” versus the incorrect “had ran” by a ratio of 21.0-to-1, which is good but not great.

Similarly, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “have run” — 8,710,000 matches
• “have ran” — 626,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “have run” versus the incorrect “have ran” by a ratio of 13.9-to-1, which is not very good, especially in light of more than half a million instances of the incorrect “have ran”.

Solution:
“had run”