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Past tense of “sit”

🪑 To rest your body on a chair or a seat.

Number 38 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the past and the participle are both sat. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “sit”

Not “sitted”. Sit does not take -ed — the past simple is sat, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Do not confuse it with…

Sit is what you do; set is what you do to something else. You sit down, but you set a glass down.

See “set” →

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.

Only the vowel moves

The consonants stay exactly where they are and the vowel changes underneath them: sit → sat, i → a. Nothing is added and nothing is dropped.

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, sat. Half the work disappears: learn sit · sat and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She sat by the window all morning. is the past simple, He has sat in that chair for hours. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

This is worth hearing rather than reading. Say sit and sat one after the other — the shape of your mouth changes, the word does not.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: