Proved/proven

[twickster]

Even professionals get confused…

“The location has ___ to be convenient for commuters from Montgomery and Bucks counties and from northeast Philadelphia.”

Proven or proved?

[Chronos]

I believe that “proved” is the simple past tense, while “proven” is the perfect tense. So with a form of the verb “have”, you would use “proven”. It’s a bit confusing because in English, usually the past and perfect use the same form of the word (the -ed form).

[Kimmy_Gibbler]

According to AHD4:

Usage Note: Prove has two past participles: proved and proven. Proved is the older form. Proven is a variant. The Middle English spellings of prove included preven, a form that died out in England but survived in Scotland, and the past participle proven, a form that probably rose by analogy with verbs like weave, woven and cleave, cloven. Proven was originally used in Scottish legal contexts, such as The jury ruled that the charges were not proven. In the 20th century, proven has made inroads into the territory once dominated by proved, so that now the two forms compete on equal footing as participles. However, when used as an adjective before a noun, proven is now the more common word: a proven talent.

[Contrapuntal]

“Proven” sounds right to me, although I can’t explain why, as Chronos did.

[Sternvogel]

My proofreading instinct says “has proven”, but this source disagrees:

I had a flashback to that time recently when I was teaching a group of science editors and they asked me whether proved or proven was the correct past participle in a sentence such as “This treatment has proved/proven effective.” At first, I did not know the answer. But of course I quickly found that proven should be used as an adjective and proved should be used as a verb, like this:

This treatment has proved effective.

The proven treatment is used most often.

[twickster]

Heh. My science writer pal, with whom I was chatting on IM while working on this, suggested I take out the “to be” and just make it “has proven convenient” – which seems to be in line with your recommendations.

Thanks, all.