I saw this yesterday in the 2009 entry confirmation for the Houston Marathon.

Problem:
The author should not have used “compromising” in the confirmation.

Explanation:
The 2009 Chevron Houston Marathon, which I am completing today, sent to me an “entry confirmation” booklet.

One of the booklet’s pages showed a map of sixteen blocks near the start of the marathon.

One sentence on that page was “The streets compromising the start line will close at 12:00 a.m.”

Yikes!

Streets to be used for the line of some 18,000 people starting the Houston Marathon cannot “compromise” that line.

Instead, those streets can comprise that start line.

Solution:
“The streets comprising the start line …”

I heard this earlier today.

Problems:
1. The speaker used the preterite where the past participle was required.
2. One does not run test results.

Explanation:
I do not remember the complete sentence, but it was something along the lines of “The test results that were ran in [some system] were inaccurate.”

Regarding the first problem, similar mistakes include “were gave” and “were 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 last Sunday.”
• 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:

• “were run” — 2,320,000 matches
• “were ran” — 107,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “were run” versus the incorrect “were ran” by a ratio of 21.7-to-1, which is good but not great.

Replacing “were ran” with “were run” gives us “The test results that were run …”, which lets us focus on the second problem: one runs tests, not test results.

Solution:
“The tests that were run …”

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”