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Past tense of “write”

✍️ To put words on paper or a screen.

Number 23 of 175 by frequency, well inside the everyday core, and three separate forms to keep apart. Worth learning properly rather than recognising vaguely.

Mistakes people make with “write”

Not “writed”. Write does not take -ed — the past simple is wrote, however regular it feels to add the ending.

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

Say it right

The w is silent in all three forms, and the participle doubles the t: written, not writen.

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

write · wrote · written. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: write → written, with wrote 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 wrote three letters yesterday.

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