Home → Irregular verbs → burn

Past tense of “burn”

🔥 To be on fire; to damage with fire or heat.

Number 82 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both burnt. Recognising it is the priority.

British and American English

British English prefers the short -t ending, burnt; American English regularises it to burned. Both are correct, and a whole group behaves this way — burn, learn, dream, smell, spell — so learning one teaches you the rest.

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, burn takes a bare -t: burnt. 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, burnt. Half the work disappears: learn burn · burnt and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She burnt the toast again this morning. is the past simple, He has burnt all the old letters. 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: