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Past tense of “lend”

🪙 To give something to someone for a short time.

Number 74 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both lent. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “lend”

Not “lended”. Lend does not take -ed — the past simple is lent, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Do not confuse it with…

You lend something to somebody, and you borrow it from them. Borrow is regular; lend is the irregular half of the pair.

A -d that hardened into a -t

Look at the last letter. Where a regular verb would take -ed, lend takes a bare -t: lent. 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, lent. Half the work disappears: learn lend · lent and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She lent me her umbrella. is the past simple, I have lent him money twice. 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: