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Past tense of “keep”

🔒 To continue to have something.

Number 22 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the past and the participle are both kept. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “keep”

Not “keeped”. Keep does not take -ed — the past simple is kept, 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, kept. Half the work disappears: learn keep · kept and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She kept all his letters for years. is the past simple, He has kept his promise. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: