The following article explains the formation of the simple past tense of English verbs including spelling changes and pronunciation.
The simple past tense is used in English to describe completed actions, to describe past habits and routines, to state past facts and truths, and to express past thoughts and feelings. For example, the simple past tense shut in the man shut the door describes a completed action, ate in she ate pizza every Friday describes a habit, was in housing was expensive states a fact, and thought in we thought the movie was boring expresses a thought.
More specifically, the simple past tense refers to verbs in the simple aspect, past tense, indicative mood, and active voice. English verbs in the simple past tense are considered either regular or irregular. Regular verbs take the suffix -ed in the past tense while irregular verbs experience some sort of stem change:
The following sections discuss the forms of both regular and irregular English verbs in the simple past tense as well as the pronunciation rules for regular English verbs.
Regular Past Tense Verbs
To form the simple past tense of most English verbs, the morphological suffix -ed is added to the end of the base form. (Morphemes are the smallest linguistic units with semantic meaning. The morphological suffix -ed signals a verb is conjugated into the simple past tense when suffixed to the base form of a verb.) The base form of an English verb is the infinitive without the preposition to functioning as an infinitive marker. For example, the following chart identifies the infinitive and simple past forms of some common regular English verbs:
- Infinitive – Simple Past
- to answer – answered
- to clean – cleaned
- to demand – demanded
- to learned – learned
- to need – needed
- to push – pushed
- to want – wanted
- to work – worked
English verbs that take the morphological suffix -ed to form the simple past tense are referred to as regular verbs.
Regular Past Tense Verb Spelling Changes
Some regular verbs experience some slight spelling changes in the simple past tense. For verbs that end with the letter e, only the morphological suffix -d is added to the end of the base form. For example:
- Infinitive – Simple Past
- to agree – agreed
- to believe – believed
- to die – died
- to invite – invited
- to live – lived
- to notice – noticed
- to save – saved
- to whine – whined
For verbs than end in a consonant followed by the letter y, the y changes to an i and is followed by the morphological suffix -ed. For example:
- Infinitive – Simple Past
- to apply – applied
- to carry – carried
- to copy – copied
- to deny – denied
- to party – partied
- to rely – relied
- to study – studied
- to try – tried
For verbs with one syllable that end in a single vowel sound followed by a single consonant (other than w or y), the final consonant is doubled and then the morphological suffix -ed is added to the end of the verb. For example:
- Infinitive – Simple Past
- to beg – begged
- to drip – dripped
- to nap – napped
- to pet – petted
- to rob – robbed
- to shop – shopped
- to stop – stopped
- to tug – tugged
For verbs with two syllables in which the second syllable is stressed, the final consonant is doubled and then the morphological suffix -ed is added to the end of the verb. For example:
- Infinitive – Simple Past
- to admit – admitted
- to benefit – benefited
- to commit – committed
- to concur – concurred
- to format – formatted
- to occur – occurred
- to prefer – preferred
- to regret – regretted
For verbs that end with the letter c, the letter k is added directly after the c and then the morphological suffix -ed is added to the end of the verb. For example:
- Infinitive – Present Participle
- to frolic – frolicked
- to mimic - mimicked
- to panic – panicked
- to picnic – picnicked
- to traffic – trafficked