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Past tense of “shoot”

🏹 To fire a gun or an arrow; to kick toward a goal.

Number 75 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both shot. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “shoot”

Not “shooted”. Shoot does not take -ed — the past simple is shot, however regular it feels to add the ending.

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.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, shot. Half the work disappears: learn shoot · shot and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — He shot an arrow at the target. is the past simple, She has shot three films this year. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

There is no tidy rule connecting shoot to shot — this is a verb you memorise as a pair and stop analysing. The consolation is that it is a pair and not a trio: shooted is the only wrong answer worth guarding against.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: