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Past tense of “hurt”
🤕 To cause pain to someone or yourself.
Number 50 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and all three forms are the same word. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.
Mistakes people make with “hurt”
Not “hurted”. Hurt does not take -ed — the past simple is hurt, however regular it feels to add the ending.
One word doing three jobs
Nothing changes. hurt is the base form, the past simple and the past participle, which sounds like a gift until you notice the catch: the word itself no longer tells you what time you are talking about. Only the rest of the sentence does.
I hurt it every day · I hurt it yesterday · I have hurt it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for hurted to make the past feel like a past. It is not a word.
Most verbs in this group already end in -t or -d, which is roughly where the -ed ending would have landed anyway. English simply stopped bothering.
- Past simple: I hurt my back last week.
- Past participle: She has hurt her ankle badly.
The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs:
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