Home → Irregular verbs → sing
Past tense of “sing”
🎤 To make music with your voice.
Number 58 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the vowel walks i → a → u. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.
Mistakes people make with “sing”
Not “have sang”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have sung, never I have sang. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
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 vowel walks i → a → u
Only one letter is doing the work. sing becomes sang becomes sung, and everything around the vowel stays where it is.
Say the three aloud and you can hear the staircase: i → a → u. This is the oldest verb pattern in the language, inherited from Germanic, and it is the one group where guessing actually works — meet a new verb of this shape and you can usually predict its forms.
The mistake to avoid is stopping halfway: I have sang instead of I have sung. The u form belongs after have.
- Past simple: She sang beautifully at the concert.
- Past participle: He has sung in a choir since childhood.
The same pattern — i → a → u — runs through 8 verbs:
Practise it
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