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Past tense of “teach”
👩🏫 To help someone learn something.
Number 54 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and the past and the participle are both taught. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.
Mistakes people make with “teach”
Not “teached”. Teach does not take -ed — the past simple is taught, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Do not confuse it with…
A teacher teaches, a student learns. “He learned me English” is a mistake in standard English, though you will hear it in some dialects.
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.
Unrecognisable base, predictable ending
Teach and taught barely look related, and that is normal for this group. What holds it together is the ending: -ought or -aught, shared by think, buy, bring, catch, teach, seek and fight.
The good news is that the past and the participle are identical — taught covers both — so there is one strange word to learn rather than two. The gh is silent; it is a fossil from a sound English lost centuries ago.
- Past simple: She taught me how to swim last summer.
- Past participle: He has taught hundreds of students.
The same pattern — the -ought gang — runs through 8 verbs:
Practise it
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