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Past tense of “be”

🧍 To exist, or to describe what someone or something is.

Number 1 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and three separate forms to keep apart. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.

Mistakes people make with “be”

Not “have was”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have been, never I have was. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

Say it right

Been is long in British English, rhyming with seen, and short in American English, where it usually sounds like bin.

Was or were?

Only be keeps two past forms for different subjects: I was, he was, it was — but you were, we were, they were. The participle, been, is the same for everybody.

There is one more were worth knowing: the unreal past in if I were you, which stays were whatever the subject.

Phrases you will actually hear

These are worth learning whole. A verb sticks far better inside a phrase somebody would really say than on its own in a table.

The participle goes back to the base

be · was · been. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: be → been, with was having nothing to do with it.

Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.

Either way the ending does the work for you. A form ending in -n needs have, has, had or a passive be in front of it; without one it stands alone as the past — She was at home yesterday evening.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: