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Past tense of “kneel”

🧎 To go down on your knees.

Number 136 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the past and the participle are both knelt. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

British and American English

British English prefers the short -t ending, knelt; American English regularises it to kneeled. Both are correct, and a whole group behaves this way — burn, learn, dream, smell, spell — so learning one teaches you the rest.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, knelt. Half the work disappears: learn kneel · knelt and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — He knelt to pick up the ring. is the past simple, She has knelt by the bed to pray. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: