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Past tense of “wind”

🔄 To turn or wrap something around and around.

Number 103 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both wound. Recognising it is the priority.

Say it right

Only the clock-winding verb belongs here, and it rhymes with find. Its past, wound, rhymes with found — while the noun wound (an injury) rhymes with moon. Same five letters, two different words.

Do not confuse it with…

Two unrelated words share this spelling: the verb here rhymes with find, while wind the weather rhymes with tinned. Its past, wound, is also the noun for an injury — pronounced differently again.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, wound. Half the work disappears: learn wind · wound and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She wound the clock before bed. is the past simple, He has wound the rope around the pole. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

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

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: