Home → Irregular verbs → put
Past tense of “put”
📦 To place something somewhere.
Number 19 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and all three forms are the same word. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.
Say it right
Rhymes with foot, not with cut. All three forms are identical, so this is the only thing about put that can go wrong.
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.
One word doing three jobs
Nothing changes. put is the base form, the past simple and the past participle, which sounds like a gift until you notice the catch: the word itself no longer tells you what time you are talking about. Only the rest of the sentence does.
I put it every day · I put it yesterday · I have put it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for putted to make the past feel like a past. It is not a word.
Most verbs in this group already end in -t or -d, which is roughly where the -ed ending would have landed anyway. English simply stopped bothering.
- Past simple: She put the keys on the table and left.
- Past participle: Where have you put my glasses?
The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs:
Practise it
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