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Past tense of “slide”

🛷 To move smoothly over a surface.

Number 141 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the past and the participle are both slid. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

Mistakes people make with “slide”

Not “slided”. Slide does not take -ed — the past simple is slid, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, slid. Half the work disappears: learn slide · slid and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — The kids slid down the icy hill. is the past simple, The glass has slid off the table. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: