proved or proven?

pontios

Well-known member
Which one gets the nod?

He has proved himself a man of his word.
or
He has proven himself a man of his word.


He has proved himself to be a man of his word.
or
He has proven himself to be a man of his word.

Of course you can say .. He proved himself a man of his word. ... proven doesn't get a look-in here.
 

nickel

Administrator
Staff member
Rather than give my personal opinion or preference in a matter like this, let us look at how I look for solutions.

One site whose texts I use as a corpus is bbc.co.uk. So let us do these two searches:

"has "proved" himself" site:bbc.co.uk
"has "proven" himself" site:bbc.co.uk

Note that I have used quotation marks within the quotation marks. When we search for a phrase, it is a good idea to restrict a key word even further by adding another set of quotation marks, because Google often tends to introduce multiple forms if allowed.

Don't pay any special attention to the thousands of hits. In fact, the phrase with "proved" has 312 results, the one with "proven" 172.

One of the problems with bbc.co.uk is that now it does not contain only pages written by its own staff. The searches include visitors' comments and therefore the corpus is somewhat corrupted by the mistakes of foreign or even native contributors.

So we get a second opinion from Google books, a less British corpus but perhaps more reliable than the former. I've had to add a word to limit results.

"has "proved" himself too"
"has "proven" himself too"

"Proved" gives more than double the results.

Next you can start reading some of the more reliable opinions at various web sites:

http://oilpatchwriting.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/proved-vs-proven/
http://www.ehow.com/how_2387488_use-proved-proven-correctly.html
 
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