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Past tense of “make”
🔨 To create or build something.
Number 7 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and the past and the participle are both made. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.
Mistakes people make with “make”
Not “maked”. Make does not take -ed — the past simple is made, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Do not confuse it with…
Make produces something — a cake, a decision, a mistake. Do covers the activity itself.
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.
Only the vowel moves
The consonants stay exactly where they are and the vowel changes underneath them: make → made, a-e → a-e. Nothing is added and nothing is dropped.
The past simple and the past participle are the same word, made. Half the work disappears: learn make · made and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — Mom made pancakes yesterday morning. is the past simple, This film was made in 1994. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.
This is worth hearing rather than reading. Say make and made one after the other — the shape of your mouth changes, the word does not.
The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs:
Practise it
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