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Past participle
The third form of a verb — gone, eaten, written. Its defining feature is that it cannot stand alone: something always comes in front of it.
The three places it turns up
- After have, has or had: She has gone out. They had eaten before we arrived.
- In the passive: This film was made in 1994. The window has been broken.
- As an adjective: a broken window, a written agreement, frozen peas.
The third use is the one nobody teaches, and it is everywhere. Once you notice that frozen peas is a participle doing an adjective's job, a lot of English stops looking arbitrary.
Past simple or past participle?
This is the whole difficulty, and there is a test that settles it every time.
- Is there a have, has or had in the sentence? You need the participle.
- Is the sentence passive — was, were, is, been plus the verb? Participle again.
- Neither? The verb is standing on its own, so it is the past simple.
Which gives: I saw it but I have seen it; he wrote back but he had written back. I have saw and I have wrote are the two most common irregular verb errors in English, and they are the same error twice.
Regular verbs make this easy
For every regular verb the past simple and the past participle are the same word — the base plus -ed. Work · worked · worked. There is nothing extra to learn, which is why the past participle only becomes a topic once irregular verbs arrive.
Why so many end in -n
Look down a list of irregular participles and the -n keeps reappearing: taken, given, known, seen, driven. That ending is older than -ed — it is the original Germanic participle marker, and it survived on the verbs used too often to be tidied up.
It is also a useful signal. If a form ends in -n and is not the base form, it is almost certainly a participle, and it is waiting for a have.
| Base | Past simple | Past participle |
|---|---|---|
| be | was | been |
| know | knew | known |
| take | took | taken |
| see | saw | seen |
| give | gave | given |
| begin | began | begun |
| write | wrote | written |
| run | ran | run |
| eat | ate | eaten |
| speak | spoke | spoken |
| break | broke | broken |
| show | showed | shown |
| win | won | won |
| fall | fell | fallen |
| drive | drove | driven |
| fly | flew | flown |
The verbs where the two forms differ
These are the ones worth drilling. Where the past simple and the participle are the same word, there is nothing to get wrong.
| Base | Past simple | Past participle |
|---|---|---|
| be | was | been |
| do | did | done |
| go | went | gone |
| know | knew | known |
| take | took | taken |
| see | saw | seen |
| come | came | come |
| give | gave | given |
| become | became | become |
| begin | began | begun |
| write | wrote | written |
| run | ran | run |
| eat | ate | eaten |
| speak | spoke | spoken |
| drink | drank | drunk |
| break | broke | broken |
| show | showed | shown |
| fall | fell | fallen |
| drive | drove | driven |
| fly | flew | flown |
All 175 verbs with all three forms →
Where the third form is compulsory
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