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Past tense of “leave”

🚪 To go away from a place.

Number 17 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and the past and the participle are both left. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.

Mistakes people make with “leave”

Not “leaved”. Leave does not take -ed — the past simple is left, 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, left. Half the work disappears: learn leave · left and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — The train left five minutes ago. is the past simple, She has left her phone at home. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: