Home → Irregular verbs → build

Past tense of “build”

🏗️ To make something by putting parts together.

Number 61 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both built. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “build”

Not “builded”. Build does not take -ed — the past simple is built, however regular it feels to add the ending.

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.

A -d that hardened into a -t

Look at the last letter. Where a regular verb would take -ed, build takes a bare -t: built. That is not an exception so much as a shortcut — English used to voice that ending, stopped bothering after certain sounds, and the spelling froze that way.

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, built. Half the work disappears: learn build · built and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — They built this bridge in 1990. is the past simple, She has built a successful company. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

The same shortcut produced built, sent, spent, slept and kept. Recognise the -t and you have recognised a whole group.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: