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Past tense of “flee”
🚨 To run away from danger.
Number 131 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the past and the participle are both fled. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “flee”
Not “fleed”. Flee does not take -ed — the past simple is fled, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Do not confuse it with…
The past is fled, never flew — that belongs to fly.
Two forms, learned as one word
The past simple and the past participle are the same word, fled. Half the work disappears: learn flee · fled and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — The family fled the burning city. is the past simple, Thousands have fled across the border. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.
There is no tidy rule connecting flee to fled — this is a verb you memorise as a pair and stop analysing. The consolation is that it is a pair and not a trio: fleed is the only wrong answer worth guarding against.
The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs:
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