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Past tense of “sow”
🌾 To plant seeds in the ground.
Number 142 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: three separate forms to keep apart. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “sow”
Not “have sowed”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have sown, never I have sowed. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Say it right
Rhymes with go. It sounds exactly like sew, and confusingly also looks like sow, the female pig, which rhymes with now.
Do not confuse it with…
Identical in sound, different in meaning: sow puts seeds in the ground, sew uses a needle. Both take -n in the participle.
British and American English
Sown is the usual participle, though sowed is also correct.
The participle goes back to the base
sow · sowed · sown. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: sow → sown, with sowed 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 — The farmer sowed wheat in spring.
- Past participle: He has sown doubt in their minds.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
Practise it
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