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Past tense of “bleed”

🩸 To lose blood.

Number 105 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both bled. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “bleed”

Not “bleeded”. Bleed does not take -ed — the past simple is bled, 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, bled. Half the work disappears: learn bleed · bled and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — His nose bled after the fall. is the past simple, The wound has bled through the bandage. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: