Home → Irregular verbs → stand

Past tense of “stand”

🗽 To be upright on your feet.

Number 39 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the past and the participle are both stood. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “stand”

Not “standed”. Stand does not take -ed — the past simple is stood, 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.

Only the vowel moves

The consonants stay exactly where they are and the vowel changes underneath them: stand → stood, a → oo. Nothing is added and nothing is dropped.

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, stood. Half the work disappears: learn stand · stood and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — We stood in line for an hour yesterday. is the past simple, That castle has stood here for centuries. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

This is worth hearing rather than reading. Say stand and stood one after the other — the shape of your mouth changes, the word does not.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: