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Past tense of “beat”
🥁 To hit many times; to win against someone.
Number 124 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the participle is the past plus -n. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “beat”
Not “beated”. Beat does not take -ed — the past simple is beat, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have beat”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have beaten, never I have beat. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Do not confuse it with…
You beat an opponent and you win a match. Beating a match or winning an opponent are both wrong.
British and American English
The participle is beaten. Plain beat as a participle survives in fixed phrases like dead beat and in informal American English.
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 grows out of the past
beat · beat · beaten. Notice where the third form comes from: not from the base, but from the past simple with an -n stuck on the end. beat → beaten.
That is the easier half of this family, because you only have to remember one strange word and then add a letter. Wear · wore · worn and swear · swore · sworn work the same way.
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 — Our team beat them 3–0.
- Past participle: You have never beaten me at chess.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
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