Home → Irregular verbs → set
Past tense of “set”
🌇 To put something in position; (of the sun) to go down.
Number 91 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and all three forms are the same word. Recognising it is the priority.
Mistakes people make with “set”
Not “setted”. Set does not take -ed — the past simple is set, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Do not confuse it with…
Set takes an object — set a date, set the table. Without one, use sit (sit · sat · sat).
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. set 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 set it every day · I set it yesterday · I have set it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for setted 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 set the table for dinner.
- Past participle: The sun has already set.
The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs:
Practise it
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