Skære

Skære ('to cut') is a strong verb: it forms its past tense by changing the vowel inside the stem rather than by adding an ending. That vowel change — æ → a → å — is called ablaut, and it is the same ancient sound-shift mechanism that gives English sing / sang / sung. Learn the three principal parts as a unit and the rest of the verb falls into place.

Principal parts

The perfect is built with have — jeg har skåret ('I have cut') — because skære is a transitive action verb, not a verb of motion or change of state. You will only meet være as the perfect auxiliary with verbs like ankomme and blive; skære is firmly in the have camp. There is no choice to agonise over here: as long as the verb takes a direct object and describes an activity rather than a journey from A to B, Danish uses have, exactly as English uses have for every perfect.

Why is skære strong in the first place? It belongs to an old Germanic verb class whose vowel alternates in a fixed pattern, and its English cousin shear (shear / shore / shorn) preserves the very same alternation. Recognising that skære and shear are the same word historically is more than trivia — it tells you to expect a vowel-changing past (skar, like shore) rather than an -ed ending, and it explains why the participle has yet another vowel (skåret, like shorn). Whenever you can pair a Danish strong verb with an irregular English cognate, let the English irregularity remind you that the Danish verb is irregular too.

The strong past: skar, not skærede

The single most important fact about skære is that its past tense is skar, with a short a and no ending. Because the present skærer ends in the regular-looking -er, learners instinctively reach for a weak past skærede — but that form does not exist in standard Danish.

Notice that the past participle skåret takes an å. The vowel marches æ → a → å across the three forms, and getting the ring (å) right in the participle is part of orthographic accuracy, not an optional flourish.

Particle verbs with skære

Like most everyday Danish verbs, skære combines with stressed particles to produce new meanings. The particle carries the main stress and usually sits after the object.

In skære sig, the reflexive pronoun matches the subject: jeg skærer mig, du skærer dig, han skærer sig, vi skærer os. For the full pattern of reflexive verbs, see [verbs/reflexive-verbs].

The key insight: skære vs klippe

English has one all-purpose verb, to cut. Danish splits the act of cutting by the tool you use, and choosing the wrong verb sounds clearly foreign.

• Skære = to cut with a knife, blade, or other single cutting edge — bread, meat, a finger, a piece of wood, a cake.
• Klippe = to cut with scissors, shears, or clippers — paper, hair, fabric, a hedge, fingernails, a coupon.

So you skærer a slice of bread but you klipper a child's hair; you skærer your finger on glass but you klipper an article out of the newspaper. Klippe is itself a regular (weak) verb — klipper / klippede / klippet — which is a second reason not to confuse the two: they behave differently grammatically as well as semantically.

When the cutting tool is a saw, Danish reaches for yet another verb, save; and to mow a lawn you slår græsset. But for the everyday split, the knife/scissors contrast between skære and klippe is the one to drill until it is automatic.

A handy way to remember which is which: klippe sounds like the snip of scissors and is the verb a hairdresser, a tailor, and a gardener with shears all use. Anything where two blades come together to pinch through the material is klippe. Anything where a single edge slides through — a knife through a tomato, a scalpel, a paper knife slitting an envelope — is skære. The kitchen is the clearest testing ground: you skærer the onion, the steak, and the cheese, but if you took a pair of kitchen scissors to a bunch of herbs you would klippe them.

Notice that the same particle, ud, attaches to both verbs but keeps the tool distinction: skære ud is to carve out with a blade, klippe ud is to cut out with scissors. The particle does not erase the choice of root verb — you still have to know whether a blade or a pair of scissors did the work.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Principal parts: skære – skærer – skar – skåret, imperative skær. The vowel runs æ → a → å.
• It is strong: the past is skar, never skærede. The participle keeps the ring: skåret.
• Perfect with have: har skåret. No subject agreement in any tense.
• Cut with a blade = skære; cut with scissors = klippe. The tool decides the verb.

For the bigger picture of how strong verbs build their past tense, see [verbs/past-strong-overview].