Perdere: Full Conjugation

Perdere (to lose) is one of the most-used Italian verbs after essere, avere, fare, and andare. You lose your keys, you lose the train, you lose patience, you lose at cards, you lose weight — every one of these uses perdere. The verb also drives a long list of fixed expressions you cannot avoid in everyday speech: perdere tempo (waste time), perdere la testa (lose your head), perdere il treno (miss the train), perdere di vista (lose sight of), perdersi (get lost).

What makes perdere genuinely interesting is that two of its tenses — the passato remoto and the past participle — each have two coexisting forms, one irregular and one regular, with subtly different feels. The irregular persi and perso dominate modern Italian; the regular perdei and perduto survive in formal, literary, and proverbial registers. A learner who only knows the regular forms will sound stiff; one who only knows the irregular forms will miss the cultural weight of phrases like amore perduto or tempo perduto.

Indicativo presente

The present indicative is fully regular. Stress falls on the first syllable in the singular and 3pl forms (pèr-do, pèr-di, pèr-de, pèr-do-no), shifting onto the ending in noi (per-dià-mo) and voi (per-dé-te). The e in the stressed stem is open /ɛ/ — a clean eh like in English bed, not a closed /e/ as in Spanish éste.

Imperfetto

Fully regular, built on the predictable stem perd- with the standard -ere imperfect endings. This is the tense for habitual losing and for setting the scene of an event in progress.

Passato remoto

This is the most distinctive feature of perdere's paradigm: two parallel passato remoto sets that are both grammatically correct. They differ only in the 1sg, 3sg, and 3pl — the classic 1-3-3 spots where Italian irregularity always lives.

The irregular set (persi, perse, persero) follows the -si pattern that you also see in prendere → presi/prese/presero and spendere → spesi/spese/spesero. The Latin source is perdidi — a doubled-stem perfect that Italian smoothed into persi. This set is by far the more common in literary, journalistic, and formal narrative writing.

The regular set (perdei / perdetti, perdé / perdette, perderono / perdettero) follows the standard -ere pattern with two further sub-variants: a single-consonant -é- form and a doubled-consonant -ette- form. Both are correct. The doubled-consonant form is older and somewhat more literary; the single-consonant form is more common in spoken passato remoto regions.

In practice: use persi/perse/persero by default. Reach for the regular forms only if you specifically want a folksy or proverbial flavour, or if you are writing for a Tuscan-influenced register where perderono sounds at home.

Futuro semplice

Regular. The thematic vowel is preserved (perdere → perder-ò), unlike vedere → vedrò. There is no contraction. Note the obligatory grave accent on the final -ò: perderò, never perdero.

Condizionale presente

Regular conditional. Watch the double m in perderemmo — single-m perderemo is the future ("we will lose"), double-m perderemmo is the conditional ("we would lose"). This is the universal -ere conditional trap.

Congiuntivo presente

The three singular forms collapse into perda, as in every -ere verb. Triggered by credo che, voglio che, è meglio che, ho paura che.

Congiuntivo imperfetto

Regular. The voi form perdeste is identical to the passato remoto voi form — context disambiguates. This tense is the workhorse of counterfactual se-clauses.

Imperativo

In practice you almost never hear the affirmative imperative of perdere — telling someone "lose!" is rare. The negative form, however, is everywhere: non perdere tempo (don't waste time), non perdere la pazienza (don't lose patience), non perderti d'animo (don't get discouraged). The negative tu form uses the infinitive: non perdere.

Forme non finite

Here lies the second great choice point of this verb: perso vs perduto.

Perso is the standard, neutral, everyday participle — it's what you'll hear in conversation, see in the news, and use in nearly every compound tense. The form descends directly from Latin perdĭtum with normal Italian sound changes (loss of intervocalic -d-, syncope of the unstressed vowel).

Perduto is the regular, more formal alternative — the participle that would have arisen if perdere followed the standard -ere model. It survives in fixed expressions, literary prose, song lyrics, and elevated registers: tempo perduto (lost time), amore perduto (lost love), paradiso perduto (Milton's Paradise Lost), anima perduta (lost soul), causa perduta (lost cause). In these phrases, replacing perduto with perso would feel jarring — it would strip away the literary patina the phrase carries.

A reliable rule of thumb:

• Compound tense → perso: ho perso, avevo perso, avrei perso, abbia perso.
• Adjectival use, especially in fixed phrases → perduto: tempo perduto, amore perduto, ricordi perduti.
• Either is fine in adjectival use outside fixed phrases, with perduto sounding slightly more literary.

Compound tenses

Perdere takes avere as its auxiliary in every compound tense. The participle does not agree with the subject but agrees with a preceding direct-object pronoun.

In the second example, perse agrees with the preceding pronoun le (feminine plural) — the same agreement rule that applies to every avere-conjugated verb.

Etymology

From Latin perdĕre "to destroy, ruin, lose" (compounded from per- "through, away" + dare "to give" — literally "to give away utterly"). The doubled-stem perfect perdidi is what produced the irregular persi/perse/persero in Italian, while perdĭtum gave both perso (with regular sound changes) and perduto (rebuilt on the productive Italian -uto pattern). This dual outcome reflects a broader fact about the Italian verb system: many -ere verbs inherited two competing past-participle traditions from late Latin, and modern Italian made a different lexical choice for each one. Perdere is unusual in keeping both alive.

Reflexive: perdersi

The reflexive perdersi ("to get lost") is one of the most useful pronominal verbs in Italian. It conjugates exactly like perdere with reflexive pronouns and the auxiliary essere in compound tenses (with participle agreement).

The figurative perdersi in un bicchiere d'acqua is one of those phrases that you simply have to know — it has no English equivalent and is used dozens of times a day in Italian.

Idioms and collocations

Perdere is at the heart of dozens of fixed expressions. The most important to internalise:

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

Perdere is regular in most of its paradigm. The two irregularities both have a "twin" alternative:

1. Passato remoto: persi/perse/persero (default) vs perdei/perdé/perderono (regular alternative). Use the irregular set in modern writing; the regular set is rare and slightly folksy.

2. Past participle: perso (default) vs perduto (literary, fixed phrases). Use perso in compound tenses; reach for perduto in adjectival uses inside fixed expressions like tempo perduto, amore perduto, paradiso perduto.

3. The reflexive perdersi means "to get lost" and uses essere in compound tenses with participle agreement — a separate verb to drill on its own terms.

For other verbs in the same -si/-so passato remoto family, see irregular passato remoto with -si pattern. The contrast with vincere (its semantic opposite, also in this paradigm guide) makes a good drilling pair.