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Past tense of “fall”

🍂 To drop down from a higher place.

Number 44 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and three separate forms to keep apart. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “fall”

Not “falled”. Fall does not take -ed — the past simple is fell, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have fell”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have fallen, never I have fell. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

Do not confuse it with…

The past of fall is fell, and fell is also a separate regular verb meaning to cut down a tree. “They felled the oak” is not the past of falling.

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.

The participle goes back to the base

fall · fell · fallen. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: fall → fallen, with fell having nothing to do with it.

Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.

Either way the ending does the work for you. A form ending in -n needs have, has, had or a passive be in front of it; without one it stands alone as the past — He fell off his bike yesterday.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: