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Past tense of “cast”
🎣 To throw something; to choose actors for a film.
Number 127 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: all three forms are the same word. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
One word doing three jobs
Nothing changes. cast is the base form, the past simple and the past participle, which sounds like a gift until you notice the catch: the word itself no longer tells you what time you are talking about. Only the rest of the sentence does.
I cast it every day · I cast it yesterday · I have cast it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for casted to make the past feel like a past. It is not a word.
Most verbs in this group already end in -t or -d, which is roughly where the -ed ending would have landed anyway. English simply stopped bothering.
- Past simple: The fisherman cast his line into the river.
- Past participle: The director has cast two new actors.
The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs:
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