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Past tense of “saw”

🪚 To cut wood with a saw.

Number 163 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: three separate forms to keep apart. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

Mistakes people make with “saw”

Not “have sawed”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have sawn, never I have sawed. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

Say it right

This is the cutting tool used as a verb, and it is regular in the past (sawed). It just happens to be spelled like the past of see.

British and American English

Regular in practice: sawed. Sawn survives in British English, mainly as an adjective — sawn-off.

The participle goes back to the base

saw · sawed · sawn. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: saw → sawn, with sawed having nothing to do with it.

Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.

Either way the ending does the work for you. A form ending in -n needs have, has, had or a passive be in front of it; without one it stands alone as the past — He sawed the board in half.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: