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Past tense of “swear”

🤚 To promise very seriously; to use bad words.

Number 148 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: three separate forms to keep apart. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

Mistakes people make with “swear”

Not “sweared”. Swear does not take -ed — the past simple is swore, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have swore”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have sworn, never I have swore. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

Say it right

All three forms rhyme with air: swear, swore, sworn keep the same vowel family throughout.

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 goes back to the base

swear · swore · sworn. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: swear → sworn, with swore having nothing to do with it.

Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.

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 — He swore to tell the truth.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: