Home → Irregular verbs → spend

Past tense of “spend”

💸 To use money or time.

Number 43 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the past and the participle are both spent. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “spend”

Not “spended”. Spend does not take -ed — the past simple is spent, however regular it feels to add the ending.

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.

A -d that hardened into a -t

Look at the last letter. Where a regular verb would take -ed, spend takes a bare -t: spent. That is not an exception so much as a shortcut — English used to voice that ending, stopped bothering after certain sounds, and the spelling froze that way.

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, spent. Half the work disappears: learn spend · spent and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — We spent the whole day at the beach. is the past simple, He has spent all his money. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

The same shortcut produced built, sent, spent, slept and kept. Recognise the -t and you have recognised a whole group.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: