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Past tense of “shut”

🔐 To close something.

Number 76 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 “shut”

Not “shutted”. Shut does not take -ed — the past simple is shut, however regular it feels to add the ending.

One word doing three jobs

Nothing changes. shut 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 shut it every day · I shut it yesterday · I have shut it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for shutted 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.

The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs: