Home → Irregular verbs → tear
Past tense of “tear”
🧻 To pull paper or cloth apart.
Number 69 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and three separate forms to keep apart. Recognising it is the priority.
Mistakes people make with “tear”
Not “teared”. Tear does not take -ed — the past simple is tore, however regular it feels to add the ending.
Not “have tore”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have torn, never I have tore. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.
Say it right
The verb rhymes with hair; the noun meaning a drop from your eye rhymes with here. Identical spelling, unrelated words.
The participle goes back to the base
tear · tore · torn. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: tear → torn, with tore 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 — She tore the letter into pieces.
- Past participle: He has torn his jeans.
The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs:
Practise it
Drill tear and 174 more on your phone
Spaced repetition, offline, free. What the app does →