Home → Irregular verbs → split
Past tense of “split”
🪓 To divide something into parts.
Number 145 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: all three forms are the same word. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “split”
Not “splitted”. Split does not take -ed — the past simple is split, however regular it feels to add the ending.
One word doing three jobs
Nothing changes. split is the base form, the past simple and the past participle, which sounds like a gift until you notice the catch: the word itself no longer tells you what time you are talking about. Only the rest of the sentence does.
I split it every day · I split it yesterday · I have split it before — identical verb, three different times. Learners often reach for splitted to make the past feel like a past. It is not a word.
Most verbs in this group already end in -t or -d, which is roughly where the -ed ending would have landed anyway. English simply stopped bothering.
- Past simple: He split the log with one blow.
- Past participle: The band has split up.
The same pattern — one form fits all — runs through 22 verbs:
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