English passive voice

This article is about the passive voice in English. For the passive voice generally, including its use in other languages, see Passive voice.

In English, as in many other languages, the passive voice is a grammatical voice in which the subject receives the action of a transitive verb. Passive voice emphasizes the process rather than who is performing the action. Passive (or passive verb) refers more generally to verbs using this construction and the passages in which they are used. In English, a passive verb is periphrastic; that is, it does not have a one-word form, but consists of an auxiliary verb plus the past participle of the transitive verb. The auxiliary verb usually is a form of the verb to be, but other auxiliary verbs, such as get, are sometimes used. The passive voice can be used in any number of tenses. The process of changing an active verb into a passive one is called passivization. Passivization is a valence-decreasing process, and it is sometimes referred to as a detranzitivizing process, because it changes transitive verbs into intransitives.

In the following passage from the Declaration of Independence, the passive verbs are bolded, while the active verb hold and the copulative verb are are italicized:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

One can still introduce the actor of a passive verb using a by phrase as was done in the example above. When such a phrase is missing, the construction is called an agentless passive. Agentless passives are sometimes preferred in official writing because they are less confrontational, for instance when announcing someone's firing. Agentless passives are also used in scientific writing, where they are intended to provide an objective description in terms of processes rather than people. Using an agentless passive, a scientist may write:

The mixture was heated to 300 °C.

without saying who actually did it, which is (or should be) irrelevant as far as the scientific process goes. This approach to scientific writing is not universally accepted, and some US organization, like the The Council of Biology Editors, have called for a more direct, active voice approach. Another entrenched use is the double passive construction used in American court reporting.

The active voice is the dominant voice in English at large, and many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged that the use of the passive voice should be minimized. However, there is general agreement that the passive is useful when the receiver of the action is more important than the doer.

Usage and style

Advice against the passive voice

Many critics and usage guides discourage the use of the passive voice. This advice is not found in older guides, but emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. Among the first writers to criticize the passive voice was Arthur Quiller-Couch, who wrote in 1916:

Generally, use transitive verbs, that strike their object; and use them in the active voice, eschewing the stationary passive, with its little auxiliary its’s and was’s, and its participles getting into the light of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a rough law, by his use of the straight verb and by his economy of adjectives you can tell a man’s style, if it be masculine or neuter, writing or 'composition.'

Two years later, William Strunk, Jr. cautioned against overuse of the passive voice in The Elements of Style, in a passage retained in later editions co-authored by E.B. White:

The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive . . . . This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary. . . . The need of making a particular word the subject of the sentence will often . . . determine which voice is to be used. The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.

In his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell stated as one of his principal rules of composition, "Never use the passive where you can use the active."

Many contemporary usage guides continue to advise against the passive voice, as in this 1993 example from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English:

Active voice makes subjects do something (to something); passive voice permits subjects to have something done to them (by someone or something). Some argue that active voice is more muscular, direct, and succinct, passive voice flabbier, more indirect, and wordier. If you want your words to seem impersonal, indirect, and noncommittal, passive is the choice, but otherwise, active voice is almost invariably likely to prove more effective.

Uses of the passive voice

In spite of the widespread criticism, the passive voice does have important uses and is employed by all skilled writers of English. Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is itself an example; over 20% of its constructions are passive, an unusually high percentage. Sentences using the passive voice are not necessarily lacking in vigor or directness:

• Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. (King James Bible, Isaiah 40:4.)
• Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York. (William Shakespeare's Richard III, I.1, ll. 1–2.)
• For of those to whom much is given, much is required. (John F. Kennedy's 1961 address to the Massachusetts legislature.)
• Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. (Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons on 20 August 1940.)

According to Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, the passive voice should be used when the receiver of the action is more important than the doer, or when the doer is unknown, unimportant, or perhaps too obvious to be worth mentioning, as in these examples:

• The child was struck by the car.
• The store was robbed last night.
• Plows should not be kept in the garage.
• Kennedy was elected president.

The passive voice can also be used to make other changes to a sentence's emphasis, including emphasizing a modifying adverb or even the performer of the action: "The breakthrough was achieved by Burlingame and Evans, two researchers in the university’s genetic engineering lab." The passive voice is sometimes used to conceal the performer of an action or the identity of a person responsible for a mistake: "We had hoped to report on this problem but the data was inadvertently deleted from our files." It is this use of the passive voice, to evade responsibility, that has been the subject of greatest criticism.

The passive voice is often used in scientific writing because of the tone of detachment and impersonality that it helps establish. However, some scientific journals prefer writers to use the active voice.

Passive constructions

In general, the passive voice is used to place focus on the grammatical patient, rather than the agent. This often occurs when the patient is the topic of the sentence. However, the passive voice can also be used when the focus is on the agent.

Canonical passives

Passive constructions have a range of meanings and uses. The canonical use is to map a clause with a direct object to a corresponding clause where the direct object has become the subject. For example:

• John threw the ball.

Here threw is a transitive verb with John as its subject and the ball as its direct object. If we recast the verb in the passive voice (was thrown), then the ball becomes the subject (it is "promoted" to the subject position) and John disappears:

• The ball was thrown.

The original "demoted" subject can typically be re-inserted using the preposition by.

• The ball was thrown by John.

Promotion of other objects

One non-canonical use of English's passive is to promote an object other than a direct object. It is usually possible in English to promote indirect objects as well. For example:

• John gave Mary a book. → Mary was given a book.
• John gave Mary a book. → Mary was given a book by John.

In the active form, gave is the verb; John is its subject, Mary its indirect object, and a book its direct object. In the passive forms, the indirect object has been promoted and the direct object has been left in place. (In "A book was given to Mary", the direct object is promoted and the indirect object left in place. In this respect, English resembles dechticaetiative languages.)

It is also possible, in some cases, to promote the object of a preposition:

• They talked about the problem. → The problem was talked about.

In the passive form here, the preposition is "stranded"; that is, it is not followed by an object. (See Preposition stranding.)

Promotion of content clauses

It is possible to promote a content clause that serves as a direct object. In this case, however, it typically does not change its position in the sentence, and an expletive it takes the normal subject position:

• They say that he left. → It is said that he left.

Stative passives

The passives described above are all eventive (or dynamic) passives. Stative (or static, or resultative) passives also exist in English; rather than describing an action, they describe the result of an action. English does not usually distinguish between the two. For example:

• The window was broken.

This sentence has two different meanings, roughly the following:

• [Someone] broke the window.
• The window was not intact.

The former meaning represents the canonical, eventive passive; the latter, the stative passive. (The terms eventive and stative/resultative refer to the tendencies of these forms to describe events and resultant states, respectively. The terms can be misleading, however, as the canonical passive of a stative verb is not a stative passive, even though it describes a state.)

Some verbs do not form stative passives. In some cases, this is because distinct adjectives exist for this purpose, such as with the verb open:

• The door was opened. → [Someone] opened the door.
• The door was open. → The door was in the open state.

Adjectival passives

Adjectival passives are not true passives; they occur when a participial adjective (an adjective derived from a participle) is used predicatively (see Adjective). For example:

• She was relieved to find her car undamaged.

Here, relieved is an ordinary adjective, though it derives from the past participle of relieve, and that past participle may be used in canonical passives:

• He was relieved of duty.

In some cases, the line between an adjectival passive and a stative passive may be unclear.

Passives without active counterparts

In a few cases, passive constructions retain all the sense of the passive voice, but do not have immediate active counterparts. For example:

• He was rumored to be a war veteran. ← *[Someone] rumored him to be a war veteran.

(The asterisk here denotes an ungrammatical construction.) Similarly:

• It was rumored that he was a war veteran. ← *[Someone] rumored that he was a war veteran.

In both of these examples, the active counterpart was once possible, but has fallen out of use.

Double passives

It is possible for a verb in the passive voice—especially an object-raising verb—to take an infinitive complement that is also in the passive voice:

• The project is expected to be completed in the next year.

Commonly, either or both verbs may be moved into the active voice:

• [Someone] expects the project to be completed in the next year.
• [Someone] is expected to complete the project in the next year.
• [Someone] expects [someone] to complete the project in the next year.

In some cases, a similar construction may occur with a verb that is not object-raising in the active voice:

• ?The project will be attempted to be completed in the next year. ← *[Someone] will attempt the project to be completed in the next year. ← [Someone] will attempt to complete the project in the next year.

(The question mark here denotes a questionably-grammatical construction.) In this example, the object of the infinitive has been promoted to the subject of the main verb, and both the infinitive and the main verb have been moved to the passive voice. The American Heritage Book of English Usage declares this unacceptable, but it is nonetheless attested in a variety of contexts.

Other passive constructions

Past participle alone

Although the passive voice, when used in the predicate verb of a complete sentence, requires the past participle to be accompanied by a form of be or another auxiliary verb, the past participle alone usually carries passive force; the auxiliary verb can therefore be omitted in certain circumstances:

• Couple found slain; Murder-suicide suspected.
• The problem, unless dealt with, will only get worse.
• A person struck by lightning has a high chance of survival.

Ergative verbs

Main article: Ergative verb

An ergative verb is a verb that may be either transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when it is intransitive plays the same semantic role as its direct object when it is transitive. For example, fly is an ergative verb, such that the following sentences are roughly synonymous:

• The airplane fly high.
• The airplane was flown.
• [Someone] flew the airplane.

One major difference is that the intransitive construction does not permit an agent to be mentioned, and indeed can imply that no agent is present, that the subject is performing the action on itself. For this reason, the intransitive construction of an ergative verb is often said to be in a middle voice, between active and passive, or in a mediopassive voice, between active and passive but closer to passive.

Reflexive verbs

A reflexive verb is a transitive verb one of whose object is a reflexive pronoun (myself, yourself, etc.) referring back to its subject. In some languages, reflexive verbs are a special class of verbs with special semantics and syntax, but in English, they typically represent ordinary uses of transitive verbs. For example, with the verb see:

• He sees her as a writer.
• She sees herself as a writer.

Nonetheless, sometimes English reflexive verbs have a passive sense, expressing an agentless action. Consider the verb solve, as in the following sentences:

• He solved the problem.
• The problem solved itself.

One could not say that the problem truly solved anything; rather, what is meant is that the problem was solved without anyone's solving it.

Similarly, certain transitive verbs can take a subject referring to a person and an object referring to the same person or to one of his body parts, again with a passive sense. Consider the verb break:

• Her leg was broken in a car accident.
• She broke her leg in a car accident.

The two sentences are almost synonymous, but the explicit passive construction is less idiomatic.

Gerunds and nominalization

Gerunds and nominalized verbs (nouns derived from verbs and referring to the actions or states expressed by them), unlike finite verbs, do not require explicit subjects. This allows an object to be expressed while omitting a subject. For example:

• The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
• Generating electricity typically requires a magnet and a solenoid.

The same applies to infinitive constructions:

• The easiest way to make more space would be to install more shelving.
• The first step is to read the manual.

Misuse of term

The term "passive voice" is sometimes misused to refer to sentence constructions that do not clearly identify the agent of the action described. An example is the following passage from The New Yorker, which refers to Bernard Madoff and in which the misidentified "passive" verbs have been bolded:

Two sentences later, Madoff said, "When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme." As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. . . . In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer: "To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties."

In actuality, would end and began are intransitive verbs in the active voice. However, the way in which the speaker uses them subtly diverts responsibility. While the passive voice is often criticized for its allowance of this practice, this example demonstrates how active constructions can also achieve this result.

Strunk & White, in The Elements of Style, apply the term to several constructions that are technically active. Geoffrey Pullum writes:

Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

• "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

• "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

• "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is presumably fingered as passive because of "impaired," but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here.