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Past tense of “speak”
🗨️ To use your voice to say words.
Number 26 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the participle is the past plus -n. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.
Mistakes people make with “speak”
Not “speaked”. Speak does not take -ed — the past simple is spoke, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have spoke”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have spoken, never I have spoke. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Do not confuse it with…
Speak is about the act of speaking, usually a language: she speaks Greek. For the words themselves, use say or tell.
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 participle grows out of the past
speak · spoke · spoken. Notice where the third form comes from: not from the base, but from the past simple with an -n stuck on the end. spoke → spoken.
That is the easier half of this family, because you only have to remember one strange word and then add a letter. Wear · wore · worn and swear · swore · sworn work the same way.
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 — She spoke to the manager an hour ago.
- Past participle: I have never spoken to him.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
Practise it
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