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Past tense of “leap”

🦘 To jump high or far.

Number 137 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the past and the participle are both leapt. 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, leapt; American English regularises it to leaped. Both are correct, and a whole group behaves this way — burn, learn, dream, smell, spell — so learning one teaches you the rest.

A -d that hardened into a -t

Look at the last letter. Where a regular verb would take -ed, leap takes a bare -t: leapt. That is not an exception so much as a shortcut — English used to voice that ending, stopped bothering after certain sounds, and the spelling froze that way.

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, leapt. Half the work disappears: learn leap · leapt and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — The deer leapt over the fence. is the past simple, Prices have leapt overnight. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

The same shortcut produced built, sent, spent, slept and kept. Recognise the -t and you have recognised a whole group.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: