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Past tense of “plead”

🙏 To ask with strong emotion; to answer a charge in court.

Number 115 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both pleaded. Recognising it is the priority.

British and American English

Pleaded is standard in British English and in careful American writing; pled is common in American legal and everyday use.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, pleaded. Half the work disappears: learn plead · pleaded and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — He pleaded guilty in court. is the past simple, She has pleaded with him to stay. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: