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Past tense of “show”

👉 To let someone see something.

Number 32 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and three separate forms to keep apart. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “show”

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

British and American English

The participle is shown in both varieties. Showed turns up as a participle in casual American speech, but shown is the safe choice in writing.

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

show · showed · shown. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: show → shown, with showed 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 showed me his photos yesterday.

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