The other day, my teenage daughter and I had a conversation about the past tense of to dive after I had used the word dived in a sentence.
One of the downsides of being a professional copywriter is that everyone waits for you to mess up when you say or write something. Then they pounce like tigers that have been starving for weeks.
As soon as I said dived, my daughter pounced on me. She immediately asked if the correct form was dove. Not wanting to eat crow, I turned to Google. It turns out, luckily for me, that both versions—dived and dove—are correct.
Dived is the older version of the two, and it is most prevalent outside of English-speaking North America. Dove is the newer term, and is most popular in the United States and Canada.
In American English, according to Google Books, the use of dove started to gain popularity around the time I was born, and had become more popular than dived by the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, Google Books doesn’t have a graph for Canadian English. That being said, Merriam-Webster claims that dove is more popular in Canada than it is in the United States, where both terms are still fairly widespread.
So, while I wasn’t technically wrong in my usage, it isn’t very Canadian.
