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Past tense of “bid”

☝️ To offer money at an auction; to say (farewell).

Number 166 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: all three forms are the same word. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

Mistakes people make with “bid”

Not “bidded”. Bid does not take -ed — the past simple is bid, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Say it right

When it means to make an offer, all three forms are bid. In the old-fashioned sense of “to command”, the past is bade, traditionally pronounced to rhyme with bad.

British and American English

At an auction, all three forms are bid. In the older sense of commanding or greeting — bade farewell — the past is bade and the participle bidden.

One word doing three jobs

Nothing changes. bid is the base form, the past simple and the past participle, which sounds like a gift until you notice the catch: the word itself no longer tells you what time you are talking about. Only the rest of the sentence does.

I bid it every day · I bid it yesterday · I have bid it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for bidded to make the past feel like a past. It is not a word.

Most verbs in this group already end in -t or -d, which is roughly where the -ed ending would have landed anyway. English simply stopped bothering.

The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs: