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Past tense of “bite”

🦷 To cut something with your teeth.

Number 81 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and three separate forms to keep apart. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “bite”

Not “bited”. Bite does not take -ed — the past simple is bit, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have bit”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have bitten, never I have bit. 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 participle goes back to the base

bite · bit · bitten. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: bite → bitten, with bit having nothing to do with it.

Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.

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 — The dog bit the postman.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: