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Past tense of “learn”
🎓 To get new knowledge or skills.
Number 94 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both learnt. Recognising it is the priority.
Do not confuse it with…
You learn something yourself; you teach it to somebody else. Many languages use one verb for both, which is exactly why this pair is worth separating.
British and American English
British English prefers the short -t ending, learnt; American English regularises it to learned. 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, learn takes a bare -t: learnt. 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, learnt. Half the work disappears: learn learn · learnt and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She learnt to drive at eighteen. is the past simple, I have learnt a lot from this course. 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:
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