Home → Irregular verbs → spring
Past tense of “spring”
🦗 To jump suddenly.
Number 146 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: the vowel walks i → a → u. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.
Mistakes people make with “spring”
Not “springed”. Spring does not take -ed — the past simple is sprang, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have sprang”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have sprung, never I have sprang. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
British and American English
Sprang is the traditional past and sprung the participle, though American English often uses sprung for both.
The vowel walks i → a → u
Only one letter is doing the work. spring becomes sprang becomes sprung, and everything around the vowel stays where it is.
Say the three aloud and you can hear the staircase: i → a → u. This is the oldest verb pattern in the language, inherited from Germanic, and it is the one group where guessing actually works — meet a new verb of this shape and you can usually predict its forms.
The mistake to avoid is stopping halfway: I have sprang instead of I have sprung. The u form belongs after have.
- Past simple: The cat sprang onto the table.
- Past participle: A leak has sprung in the pipe.
The same pattern — i → a → u — runs through 8 verbs:
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