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Past tense of “sew”
🪡 To join cloth with a needle and thread.
Number 172 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 “sew”
Not “have sewed”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have sewn, never I have sewed. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Say it right
Rhymes with go, not with new — and it is a perfect homophone of sow, the planting verb, which behaves the same way grammatically.
Do not confuse it with…
A perfect homophone of sow, the planting verb. Only context tells them apart in speech.
Two accepted forms
Both sewed are in use as the past simple, and the participle is either sewn or sewed. Dictionaries list them side by side, so neither will be marked wrong.
The participle goes back to the base
sew · sewed · sewn. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: sew → sewn, with sewed 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 — She sewed a button onto the coat.
- Past participle: The costume has been sewn by hand.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
Practise it
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