Home → Irregular verbs → forget
Past tense of “forget”
🤷 To fail to remember something.
Number 48 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 “forget”
Not “forgeted”. Forget does not take -ed — the past simple is forgot, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have forgot”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have forgotten, never I have forgot. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
British and American English
Forgotten in British English; American English also allows forgot as the participle, though forgotten is never wrong.
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
forget · forgot · forgotten. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: forget → forgotten, with forgot 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 — I forgot my umbrella at home this morning.
- Past participle: She has forgotten his name again.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
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