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Past tense of “become”

🦋 To change into something else.

Number 16 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 “become”

Not “becomed”. Become does not take -ed — the past simple is became, however regular it feels to add the ending.

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

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 base form comes back

Watch the round trip: become → became → become. The past simple steps away, and the participle returns to exactly the base form you started from.

That symmetry is easy to remember and easy to misuse. Become on its own is never a past tense — I become yesterday is wrong, I became yesterday is right. The moment there is a have in front of it, you switch back: The city has become much safer.

The same pattern — there and back — runs through 4 verbs: