Home → Irregular verbs → hide

Past tense of “hide”

🙈 To put something where no one can find it.

Number 66 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and three separate forms to keep apart. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “hide”

Not “hided”. Hide does not take -ed — the past simple is hid, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have hid”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have hidden, never I have hid. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

British and American English

The participle is hidden. Bare hid as a participle is archaic and will read as a mistake today.

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

hide · hid · hidden. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: hide → hidden, with hid 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 — The cat hid under the bed.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: