dar

Dar means to give, but that one-word gloss undersells how much work this tiny verb does in Spanish. Dar is the engine behind dozens of high-frequency expressions — dar las gracias (to thank), dar miedo (to scare), dar un paseo (to go for a walk), dar igual (to not matter), darse cuenta (to realize), dar la lata (to be a pain). If you stripped dar out of peninsular Spanish, half of everyday conversation would collapse.

It is also one of the most subtly irregular verbs in the language. The infinitive looks like a perfectly ordinary -ar verb, but almost nothing about its conjugation is ordinary: the yo form is doy (paralleling soy, voy, estoy), the preterite is monosyllabic (di, dio — no written accents because monosyllables generally don't take them), the present subjunctive is dé (with an obligatory accent to distinguish it from the preposition de), and the imperfect subjunctive borrows -ir/-er endings (diera, diese) rather than the expected -ar pattern. None of this is regular; all of it is high-frequency.

Non-finite forms

The gerundio and participio are perfectly regular. All the irregularity lives in the finite forms.

Indicative — simple tenses

Presente

The yo form doy belongs to the closed club of -oy verbs (soy, voy, estoy, doy) — a survival from Old Spanish. The vosotros form is dais, written without an accent because it counts as a monosyllable (the a-i is treated as a diphthong here, unlike caéis where the hiatus is broken). Everywhere else the conjugation looks like a regular -ar verb.

Pretérito perfecto simple

This is where dar breaks the rules. It takes -er/-ir endings, not -ar endings, in the preterite — and the monosyllabic forms di and dio carry no written accent. Until a 1999 RAE reform, dió was occasionally written with an accent; modern orthography forbids it. Vio and fue follow the same no-accent rule. The vosotros form disteis is also accent-less.

Pretérito imperfecto

Completely regular -ar imperfect.

Futuro simple

Built on the full infinitive dar-, perfectly regular.

Condicional

Indicative — compound tenses

All compound tenses use the regular participle dado with haber.

Pretérito perfecto compuesto

Pretérito pluscuamperfecto

Futuro compuesto

Condicional compuesto

Subjunctive — simple tenses

Presente de subjuntivo

The yo and él forms of the subjunctive are written dé with an obligatory diacritic. Without the accent, de is the preposition of/from. The accent here is purely a diacrítico — it doesn't mark stress (the monosyllable would be stressed anyway), it disambiguates two words spelled the same. The other forms (des, demos, deis, den) don't need accents because there's no homograph to confuse them with. Note that demos and deis are accent-less — they're not démos or déis.

Imperfecto de subjuntivo (-ra / -se)

Built from the third-person plural preterite (dieron → diera / diese). The endings are -er/-ir endings, not -ar endings — yet another irregularity. Both -ra and -se sets are interchangeable; -ra dominates in Spain.

Subjunctive — compound tenses

Pretérito perfecto de subjuntivo

Pluscuamperfecto de subjuntivo

Imperative

The affirmative tú form is da — no irregularity there. The affirmative vosotros form is dad, the regular -ar imperative ending. Negative imperatives use the present subjunctive (so the diacritic dé reappears in no dé).

When pronouns are attached, the stress shift may require an accent: dame (no accent — single pronoun, original stress is preserved), dámelo (accent — two pronouns push the stress back so we mark it). Vosotros + os loses the -d: daos (rare in practice with dar).

High-frequency expressions with dar

Dar is the verb of choice for dozens of idiomatic constructions. The ones below are not optional vocabulary — they are how people talk in Spain. Anything marked (Spain) is much less common in Latin America.

Dar as a backwards-feeling verb

Three of the most common dar constructions use the gustar-style structure, where the grammatical subject is the thing causing the feeling and the person experiencing it is the indirect object:

• Me da miedo volar. — Flying scares me. (literally "flying gives me fear")
• A mi padre le da pena verlo así. — It makes my dad sad to see him like that.
• Os da igual a vosotros, pero a mí me importa. — You don't care, but I do.

The verb agrees with what is causing the reaction, not with the experiencer. This is the same architecture as gustar, encantar, doler, importar.

The classic English-speaker error

English distinguishes give (transitive, with a direct object) and a constellation of other verbs for emotional states (to scare, to disgust, to bore). Spanish often uses dar with an abstract noun for the same meaning: not me asusta but me da miedo; not me aburre but me da pereza; not me molesta but me da rabia. English-speakers tend to overuse the dedicated verb when dar + noun is more idiomatic.

The second error is leaving off the diacritic on dé. Spanish has fifteen pairs of one-syllable words distinguished only by an accent (el/él, tu/tú, mi/mí, se/sé, de/dé, mas/más, te/té, si/sí, etc.), and de vs. dé is one of the most consequential. Writing espero que me de tiempo instead of espero que me dé tiempo is a spelling mistake on a par with confusing its and it's in English.

A third common slip: putting an accent on di or dio on the analogy of other preterites (viví, comí). Monosyllables don't take accents unless they're disambiguating a homograph, and there's nothing to disambiguate di or dio from. They stay bare.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• The yo form is doy (yo-oy family with soy, voy, estoy).
• The preterite is monosyllabic and accent-less: di, dio, never dí, dió.
• The present subjunctive dé takes a diacritic to distinguish it from the preposition de; the other forms (des, demos, deis, den) do not.
• The imperfect subjunctive uses -er/-ir endings (diera, diese), not -ar endings.
• Dar is the engine of dozens of high-frequency expressions; mastering the verb means mastering dar las gracias, darse cuenta, dar igual, dar miedo, dar la lata, and the dozen others above.
• The gustar-style construction (me da miedo, me da igual) is the default for many emotional reactions where English would use a dedicated verb.