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Past tense of “sweep”

🧹 To clean the floor with a brush.

Number 93 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both swept. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “sweep”

Not “sweeped”. Sweep does not take -ed — the past simple is swept, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, swept. Half the work disappears: learn sweep · swept and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She swept the kitchen after dinner. is the past simple, The wind has swept the leaves away. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

There is no tidy rule connecting sweep to swept — this is a verb you memorise as a pair and stop analysing. The consolation is that it is a pair and not a trio: sweeped is the only wrong answer worth guarding against.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: