Every verb in this topic is irregular in the kindest way there is: its past simple and its past participle are the same word. The questions hand you a sentence with one verb missing and ask you to choose that word from a short list, to type it into the gap, to mark every option that fits, or to judge which of several finished sentences is built correctly. The work is therefore almost never about which past tense the sentence means; it is about whether the shape you write exists at all.
One shape, two slots
English gives every verb two past slots. In the first the verb stands alone as the past simple, usually with a marker of finished time nearby: yesterday, last March, in 2018, three weeks ago. In the second the verb follows the auxiliary have or has and builds a perfect. A regular verb puts the identical -ed word into both slots, and the verbs of this topic do the same trick with an irregular word: one changed shape, learned once, covers both. That is why the auxiliary in front, and not the verb at the end, is what separates the two structures.
The changed shape is not arbitrary either. A handful of patterns covers nearly everything in this topic, and recognising the pattern is lighter work than memorising two words per verb.
| How the one past shape is built | Verbs in this topic |
|---|---|
| A vowel change and nothing more | hold → held, stand → stood, meet → met, win → won, sit → sat |
| A vowel change plus -t | keep → kept, feel → felt, leave → left |
| A vowel change plus -d | sell → sold, say → said |
| The -ought and -aught group | buy → bought, catch → caught, teach → taught |
| A shorter spelling of the base | lead → led |
So read the sentence for the slot, then write the shape. Because both slots want the identical word, a wrong answer here is hardly ever a tense mistake. It is a shape that belongs to no English verb at all.
Where the marks are lost
- The regular ending forced onto an irregular verb. Options such as buyed, catched, teached, selled, meaned and sended are built by the -ed rule these verbs reject. The changed shape is the whole past, and nothing is added to it.
- A regular ending stacked on top of the changed shape. Kepted starts from a past that is already complete and glues -ed to it. One verb carries one past marker, never two.
- An archaic participle in -en. Boughten and holden imitate the second participle that three-form verbs have, and they tempt you to expect a special word for the perfect slot. This group has no such word: whatever stands alone also follows have or has.
- A base or present form left after the auxiliary. Options such as catch, hold and says are offered where a perfect needs its participle. An auxiliary plus a base form is an unfinished structure, and an -s form belongs to the present tense, where no auxiliary precedes it.
- A base form that looks close enough to a past. Lead is offered in sentences that need its own past led, and the two differ by a single letter rather than by a pattern. Decide the slot first, and let the slot pick the spelling.
Try it
Since the baby arrived, my brother has barely ____ more than four hours a night.
- sleeped
- sleep
- slept
Complete the sentence with the correct form of the verb in brackets: "The union has ____ (strike) a deal with the management at last."
Select every option that correctly completes the sentence "We have ____ that song on the radio all week."
- heared
- herd
- hear
- heard