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Past tense of “bend”

🙇 To make something curved; to lean down.

Number 80 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both bent. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “bend”

Not “bended”. Bend does not take -ed — the past simple is bent, however regular it feels to add the ending.

A -d that hardened into a -t

Look at the last letter. Where a regular verb would take -ed, bend takes a bare -t: bent. That is not an exception so much as a shortcut — English used to voice that ending, stopped bothering after certain sounds, and the spelling froze that way.

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, bent. Half the work disappears: learn bend · bent and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — He bent down to tie his shoes. is the past simple, She has bent the wire into a circle. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

The same shortcut produced built, sent, spent, slept and kept. Recognise the -t and you have recognised a whole group.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: