Home → Irregular verbs → cut
Past tense of “cut”
✂️ To divide something with a knife or scissors.
Number 45 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and all three forms are the same word. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.
Mistakes people make with “cut”
Not “cutted”. Cut does not take -ed — the past simple is cut, 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.
One word doing three jobs
Nothing changes. cut 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 cut it every day · I cut it yesterday · I have cut it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for cutted 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: She cut the cake into eight pieces.
- Past participle: I have cut my finger.
The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs:
Practise it
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