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Past tense of “breed”

🐇 To keep animals so they produce young.

Number 126 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the past and the participle are both bred. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

Mistakes people make with “breed”

Not “breeded”. Breed does not take -ed — the past simple is bred, 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, bred. Half the work disappears: learn breed · bred and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — He bred horses on his farm. is the past simple, She has bred dogs all her life. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: