Dar Conjugation: All Tenses, Explained Simply (with Examples)
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Dar is one of the shortest verbs in Spanish, and one of the busiest. It means “to give”, it turns up in half the idioms you'll ever learn (dar un paseo, darse cuenta, dar igual), and despite having a tidy little one-letter stem, it's deceptively irregular. It's an -ar verb that quietly borrows its preterite endings from the -er/-ir camp: di, diste, dio. Why would a verb do that to you?
Don't worry. By the end of this guide you'll have every tense of dar laid out in clean tables, with example sentences for each, plus a rundown of the idioms that make this tiny verb worth learning properly. But first, the hack that saves you weeks of work.
The Dar Conjugation Hack: Learn These First
Here's the honest truth about conjugation tables: you do not need to memorise all seventeen tenses before you can use dar in real conversation. Native-sounding beginners lean on a tiny handful of forms.
If you learn nothing else today, learn the present tense of dar by heart:
- doy (“I give”), das (“you give”), da (“he/she/it gives”), damos (“we give”), dais (“you all give”), dan (“they give”)
That single row of six words will carry you through gift-giving, favours, directions, and a good chunk of everyday idioms. Add the preterite (di, “I gave”) for one-off past events and the imperfect (daba, “I used to give”) for habits and background description, and you've covered the vast majority of everyday speech. Everything below that is for rounding out your Spanish over time, not for blocking you today.
Right, now let's build the full picture.
Dar at a Glance
| Infinitive | dar |
| Gerund (-ing) | dando |
| Past participle | dado |
| Verb type | irregular |
| English meaning | “to give” |
A quick note on the pronouns I'll use in every table:
| Spanish | English |
|---|---|
| yo | I |
| tú | you (informal singular) |
| él / ella / usted | he / she / you (formal singular) |
| nosotros / nosotras | we |
| vosotros / vosotras | you all (informal, Spain) |
| ellos / ellas / ustedes | they / you all (formal) |
Dar Conjugation: Indicative Mood (Simple Tenses)
The indicative is the everyday, “stating facts” mood, and these five simple tenses are the backbone of dar. Here they all are in one place:
| Pronoun | Present | Preterite | Imperfect | Future | Conditional |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| yo | doy | di | daba | daré | daría |
| tú | das | diste | dabas | darás | darías |
| él / ella / usted | da | dio | daba | dará | daría |
| nosotros/as | damos | dimos | dábamos | daremos | daríamos |
| vosotros/as | dais | disteis | dabais | daréis | daríais |
| ellos / ellas / ustedes | dan | dieron | daban | darán | darían |
And here's each one in action:
- Present – Te doy mi palabra. – “I give you my word.”
- Preterite (a finished past event) – Le di las gracias por su ayuda. – “I thanked him for his help.”
- Imperfect (a past description or repeated action) – De niña, mi abuela siempre me daba caramelos. – “As a child, my grandmother always used to give me sweets.”
- Future – Te daré la respuesta mañana. – “I'll give you the answer tomorrow.”
- Conditional – Me daría mucha alegría verte. – “It would give me great joy to see you.”
Dar Conjugation: Indicative Mood (Compound Tenses)
Good news here: the compound tenses are the easy part. Every one of them is simply the verb haber (conjugated) plus the past participle dado. Learn haber once and these fall into place for every verb in Spanish.
| Pronoun | Present Perfect | Pluperfect | Future Perfect | Conditional Perfect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| yo | he dado | había dado | habré dado | habría dado |
| tú | has dado | habías dado | habrás dado | habrías dado |
| él / ella / usted | ha dado | había dado | habrá dado | habría dado |
| nosotros/as | hemos dado | habíamos dado | habremos dado | habríamos dado |
| vosotros/as | habéis dado | habíais dado | habréis dado | habríais dado |
| ellos / ellas / ustedes | han dado | habían dado | habrán dado | habrían dado |
- Present perfect – Me has dado una idea genial. – “You've given me a great idea.”
- Pluperfect – Ya le había dado las llaves antes de irme. – “I had already given him the keys before I left.”
- Future perfect – Para entonces, ya habremos dado el paseo. – “By then, we'll have already taken the walk.”
- Conditional perfect – Habría dado cualquier cosa por estar allí. – “I would have given anything to be there.”
(There's one more, the pretérito anterior, hube dado, but you can happily ignore it. It's so rare in modern Spanish that even native speakers go their whole lives without using it.)
Dar Conjugation: Subjunctive Mood
The subjunctive is the mood of doubt, wishes, emotion, and things that aren't (yet) facts. It feels intimidating at first, but with dar you really only need two forms day to day: the present subjunctive and the imperfect subjunctive.
| Pronoun | Present Subjunctive | Imperfect Subjunctive (-ra) | Imperfect Subjunctive (-se) |
|---|---|---|---|
| yo | dé | diera | diese |
| tú | des | dieras | dieses |
| él / ella / usted | dé | diera | diese |
| nosotros/as | demos | diéramos | diésemos |
| vosotros/as | deis | dierais | dieseis |
| ellos / ellas / ustedes | den | dieran | diesen |
Notice the accent on dé in the yo and él/ella/usted forms. Without it, de is a completely different word, the preposition meaning “of” or “from”. That little mark is doing loads of work.
The imperfect subjunctive has two forms, the -ra and the -se. They mean exactly the same thing and are interchangeable; the -ra form is more common in speech, especially in Latin America, so lead with that one.
- Present subjunctive – Espero que me dé una segunda oportunidad. – “I hope he gives me a second chance.”
- Imperfect subjunctive – Si me dieras la oportunidad, te sorprendería. – “If you gave me the chance, I'd surprise you.”
The subjunctive also has compound forms, built (again) from haber plus dado:
| Pronoun | Present Perfect Subj. | Pluperfect Subj. |
|---|---|---|
| yo | haya dado | hubiera / hubiese dado |
| tú | hayas dado | hubieras / hubieses dado |
| él / ella / usted | haya dado | hubiera / hubiese dado |
| nosotros/as | hayamos dado | hubiéramos / hubiésemos dado |
| vosotros/as | hayáis dado | hubierais / hubieseis dado |
| ellos / ellas / ustedes | hayan dado | hubieran / hubiesen dado |
There's also a future subjunctive (diere, dieres…), but you can safely file it under “nice to recognise, never need to produce”. It survives only in legal documents and old-fashioned proverbs.
Dar Conjugation: Imperative Mood (Commands)
Telling someone to “give” something uses the imperative, and dar has one quirk worth flagging: the informal tú command and the negative tú command don't look anything alike.
| Pronoun | Affirmative | Negative |
|---|---|---|
| tú | da | no des |
| usted | dé | no dé |
| nosotros/as | demos | no demos |
| vosotros/as | dad | no deis |
| ustedes | den | no den |
- ¡Da la vuelta a la izquierda! – “Turn left!”
- No des tantas vueltas al asunto. – “Stop going round in circles about it.”
When to Use Dar
Dar covers literal giving, obviously, handing something to someone, giving a gift, giving your word. But where it earns its keep is in the huge stack of everyday idioms built on it. Learn these and your Spanish will sound instantly more natural:
- Literal giving – Te doy este regalo. – “I'm giving you this present.”
- dar un paseo (“to take a walk”) – Vamos a dar un paseo por la playa. – “Let's take a walk along the beach.”
- darse cuenta (de) (“to realise”) – No me di cuenta de la hora. – “I didn't realise what time it was.”
- dar igual (“to not matter, to make no difference”) – Me da igual qué película veamos. – “It doesn't matter to me which film we watch.”
- dar a (“to face, to overlook”) – Mi ventana da al jardín. – “My window looks out onto the garden.”
- A few more worth banking: dar las gracias (to thank), dar un abrazo (to give a hug), darse prisa (to hurry up), dar con (to come across, to find).
None of these translate word for word, so treat them as vocabulary in their own right rather than trying to reconstruct them from “give” each time.
Why Is Dar Irregular?
Dar is an -ar verb, so by the regular rules its preterite should look like dé, daste, dó, damos, dasteis, daron. It doesn't. Instead it borrows the preterite pattern normally reserved for -er and -ir verbs: di, diste, dio, dimos, disteis, dieron. That's the same shape as comer would use (comí, comiste, comió), just without the written accents, because di and dio are only one syllable and Spanish doesn't accent monosyllables that don't need disambiguating. (Older, pre-1959 spelling did write dió with an accent. If you ever see it in an old book or song lyric, that's why.)
The present tense has its own quirk: doy ends in -oy, an ending shared by exactly three other verbs, ir (voy), ser (soy), and estar (estoy). These are sometimes taught together as “the four -oy verbs”, and once you've clocked the pattern, doy stops looking so odd.
Common Mistakes with Dar
A few traps that catch nearly everyone:
- Adding an accent to di or dio. Learners often reach for dí or dió by analogy with dé, but the preterite forms carry no written accent. Dí and dió are both wrong.
- Mixing up dé and de. Dé (with an accent) is the present subjunctive/formal command; de (no accent) is the preposition “of” or “from”. Espero que me dé el libro versus el libro de mi hermano look almost identical on the page but mean very different things.
- Translating the idioms literally. Dar un paseo isn't “to give a walk”, it's “to take a walk”. Learn the idiom as a fixed phrase rather than building it word by word, or you'll end up with sentences that are grammatically fine and make no sense.
Dar Conjugation FAQ
Is dar regular or irregular? Irregular. Its present tense (doy) and preterite (di, diste, dio…) both break from the standard -ar pattern.
What are the six present-tense forms of dar? Doy, das, da, damos, dais, dan, which is “I give, you give, he/she gives, we give, you all give, they give.”
How do you conjugate dar in the preterite? Di, diste, dio, dimos, disteis, dieron, note there's no written accent on di or dio, even though they're stressed on that syllable.
Why does dar's past tense look like an -er/-ir verb? Because it borrows those endings rather than the regular -ar preterite endings. It's an irregularity, not a typo, and the forms it produces run exactly parallel to the preterite of ver, another high-frequency verb.
What's the difference between dé and de? Dé (accented) is a form of the verb dar, used in the present subjunctive and as the formal command. De (no accent) is the preposition “of” or “from”. Context and that tiny accent mark are all that separate them.
¡Ya Sabes Dar!
You've now got every tense of dar laid out with an example for each, the idioms that make it worth learning properly, and the backstory behind why such a short verb causes so much fuss. That's a solid foundation to build on.
The fastest way to lock these in is to use them. Build a few of these forms into flashcards (we love Anki for exactly this), then start dropping dar un paseo or me da igual into real conversations. While you're at it, our guides to ser vs estar and Spanish numbers pair nicely with this one for rounding out your foundations. If you'd like to hear dar used naturally by native speakers, SpanishPod101 is a great listening resource.
But the tables were only ever the warm-up. What matters is walking up to someone and offering something real, whether that's a gracias, a paseo, or just your word. That's exactly what we get you doing from day one inside the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp. So go on, give it a go. ¡Date prisa!
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