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Past tense of “feed”

🍼 To give food to a person or an animal.

Number 85 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both fed. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “feed”

Not “feeded”. Feed does not take -ed — the past simple is fed, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, fed. Half the work disappears: learn feed · fed and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She fed the chickens at dawn. is the past simple, Have you fed the cat today? is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

There is no tidy rule connecting feed to fed — this is a verb you memorise as a pair and stop analysing. The consolation is that it is a pair and not a trio: feeded is the only wrong answer worth guarding against.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: