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Past tense of “see”

👀 To notice something with your eyes.

Number 11 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and three separate forms to keep apart. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.

Mistakes people make with “see”

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

Do not confuse it with…

See is passive — it just happens. Look at is deliberate, and watch follows something over time. You saw an accident, you looked at a photo, you watched a film.

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 participle goes back to the base

see · saw · seen. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: see → seen, with saw 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 — We saw a great movie last night.

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