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Past tense of “find”

🔍 To discover something you were looking for.

Number 14 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and the past and the participle are both found. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.

Mistakes people make with “find”

Not “finded”. Find does not take -ed — the past simple is found, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Do not confuse it with…

The past of find is found, and found is also its own regular verb meaning to establish something. A company was founded in 1990 — it was not found.

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.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, found. Half the work disappears: learn find · found and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — I found my keys under the sofa. is the past simple, They have found a solution at last. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: