Home → Irregular verbs → run
Past tense of “run”
🏃 To move very fast on your feet.
Number 24 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and three separate forms to keep apart. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.
Mistakes people make with “run”
Not “runned”. Run does not take -ed — the past simple is ran, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have ran”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have run, never I have ran. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
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.
The base form comes back
Watch the round trip: run → ran → run. The past simple steps away, and the participle returns to exactly the base form you started from.
That symmetry is easy to remember and easy to misuse. Run on its own is never a past tense — I run yesterday is wrong, I ran yesterday is right. The moment there is a have in front of it, you switch back: She has run this café for ten years.
- Past simple: He ran five kilometers yesterday morning.
The same pattern — there and back — runs through 4 verbs:
Practise it
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