Verbs – Past Tense

Verbs have different forms, called tenses. The tense of a verb tells us when the action happens.

The Simple Past Tense

We use the simple past tense to talk about things that happened in the past.

Examples:

The children visited the zoo last week.
The plane landed a few minutes ago.
Jerry dried his clothes in the sun.

Regular Verbs

For most verbs, the simple past tense is created by adding a d, ed or ied at the end of the word. These are called regular verbs. There are also irregular verbs which do not follow this pattern.

The following are some of the rules for regular verbs.

For verbs ending in e add a d.

Example:

For verbs ending in consonant + y, change y to i and add ed.

For verbs that are one syllable and ending in vowel + consonant (but not y or w), double the consonant and then add ed.

For other verbs, just add ed.

Videos

This lesson covers the rules both for pronouncing and for spelling past tense verbs.


This video explains how to pronounce past tense regular verbs in English.

This video shows the pronunciation of regular verbs. The "ed" ending might be a "d" or a "t," depending on what comes before it.

This video shows how to pronounce regular verbs in the past tense in English.

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