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Past tense of “know”
🧠 To have information in your mind.
Number 8 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and three separate forms to keep apart. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.
Mistakes people make with “know”
Not “knowed”. Know does not take -ed — the past simple is knew, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have knew”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have known, never I have knew. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
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.
ew in the past, own in the participle
Two endings, in a fixed order: the past simple takes knew, the participle takes known. Once you have heard know · knew · known, this whole group falls into place.
Because the two forms rhyme with such different words, they are hard to mix up in speech and easy to mix up in writing. Knew stands alone; known waits for have — They have known each other since school.
- Past simple: I knew the answer right away.
The same pattern — ew → own — runs through 7 verbs:
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