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Past tense of “forbid”
⛔ To say that something is not allowed.
Number 133 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: three separate forms to keep apart. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “forbid”
Not “forbided”. Forbid does not take -ed — the past simple is forbade, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have forbade”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have forbidden, never I have forbade. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Say it right
The past forbade is traditionally pronounced to rhyme with bad, though “for-BAYD” is now common and accepted.
British and American English
Forbade is the standard past; forbad is an older spelling you may meet in older books.
The participle goes back to the base
forbid · forbade · forbidden. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: forbid → forbidden, with forbade 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 — Her father forbade her to go out.
- Past participle: Smoking has been forbidden here for years.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
Practise it
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