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Past tense of “bind”

🪢 To tie things together.

Number 125 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the past and the participle are both bound. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

Mistakes people make with “bind”

Not “binded”. Bind does not take -ed — the past simple is bound, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, bound. Half the work disappears: learn bind · bound and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — They bound the boxes with rope. is the past simple, The contract has bound them for ten years. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

There is no tidy rule connecting bind to bound — this is a verb you memorise as a pair and stop analysing. The consolation is that it is a pair and not a trio: binded is the only wrong answer worth guarding against.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: