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Past tense of “have”

🤲 To own or hold something.

Number 2 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and the past and the participle are both had. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.

Mistakes people make with “have”

Not “haved”. Have does not take -ed — the past simple is had, however regular it feels to add the ending.

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, had. Half the work disappears: learn have · had and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — They had dinner at eight last night. is the past simple, She has had that car for ten years. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: