• 4-minute read
  • 11th October 2020

Grammar Tips: What Is a Past Participle?

You almost certainly use past participles on a daily basis if you speak English. But what exactly is a past participle? And how do past participles work? In this post, we’ll explain the basics of how to use these words in your writing.

What Is a Past Participle?

Past participles are a type of verb used in two main situations:

  1. To form the perfect tenses (e.g. present perfect, past perfect).
  2. As an adjective to modify a noun or pronoun.

We’ll look at both uses in detail next. And after that, to finish the post, we’ll look at the difference between regular and irregular past participles.

The Perfect Tenses

As verbs, we use past participles to express a completed action in the perfect tenses (i.e. the present, past, and future perfect tenses):

  • Present perfect = have/has + past participle (e.g. I have looked)
  • Past perfect = had + past participle (e.g. I had looked)
  • Future perfect = will have + past participle (e.g. I will have looked)

We use the present perfect tense for things that began in the past and remain true or to discuss actions completed within a stated ongoing time:

They have always liked dancing together.

She has walked to work four times this week so far.

The past perfect, meanwhile, is used for actions completed before a point in time (either specified or unspecified) or a conditional set in the past:

We had lost all hope until you found us!

She had danced there several times before.

If we had looked harder, we would have found it.

And the future perfect is for actions that will be complete by a certain time:

He will have finished his homework by tomorrow morning.

There are also continuous perfect tenses, such as the present perfect continuous, which are concerned with ongoing actions. But these use present participles instead (i.e. verbs that end ‘-ing’, like ‘looking’).

Past Participles as Adjectives

We can also use past participles as adjectives (i.e. to modify a noun or pronoun). Typically, this involves placing the past participle before the word we want to modify, such as in the following sentences:

He couldn’t hide the shocked look on his face.

She took her broken watch to get repaired.

Here, the past participles ‘shocked’ and ‘broken’ modify the nouns ‘look’ and ‘watch’, respectively. However, we can also use past participles as modifiers after a linking verb, such as in the following:

The kids were bored by the class.

The boy seems excited.

In the first sentence above, the linking verb ‘were’ connects the noun ‘kids’ and the past participle ‘bored’. And in the second, we link ‘boy’ (noun) and ‘excited’ (past participle) with the linking verb ‘seems’.

Regular vs. Irregular Past Participles

When forming a past participle, it will usually end ‘-ed’. You can see this in most of the examples above! But this depends on whether the verb is regular or irregular. The difference here is:

  • Regular past participles are all formed by adding ‘-ed’, ‘-ied’, or ‘-d’ and match the simple past tense form of the verb (e.g. the simple past tense and past participle forms of ‘kick’ are both ‘kicked’).
  • Irregular past participles do not follow a regular pattern and have a range of word endings, not just ‘-ed’. And while some irregular verbs use the same form for the simple past tense and past participle (e.g. bend/bent/bent), others use different forms (e.g. drive/drove/driven).

You can see examples of some more irregular verbs below:

Base Verb

Simple Past Tense

Past Participle

Arise

Arose

Arisen

Be

Was/Were

Been

Begin

Began

Began

Come

Came

Come

Cut

Cut

Cut

Deal

Dealt

Dealt

Do

Did

Done

Drink

Drank

Drunk

Eat

Ate

Eaten

Freeze

Froze

Frozen

Go

Went

Gone

Grow

Grew

Grown

Hit

Hit

Hit

Know

Knew

Known

Lay

Laid

Laid

Lie

Lay

Lain

Meet

Met

Met

Overtake

Overtook

Overtaken

Pay

Paid

Paid

Quit

Quit

Quit

Read

Read

Read

Ride

Rode

Ridden

Sweep

Swept

Swept

Swim

Swam

Swum

Tear

Tore

Torn

Throw

Threw

Thrown

Understand

Understood

Understood

Wake

Woke

Woken

Write

Wrote

Written

 
Unfortunately, there are no reliable tips for spelling irregular past participles correctly beyond practising them! As such, make sure to look up the spelling if you’re not sure about the past participle form of a verb.

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