-ed versus -t

Ben Yagoda (Friend of SbaCL and Not One-Off Britishisms blogger), who had recently noticed a US journalist saying learnt instead of learned, asked whether I'd covered the ed/t alternation. It's one of those things that I've been putting off for a long time because it would be a very long post. Now I've been shamed out of my laziness.

In order to do this in any kind of sensible way, I feel like I need to explain some things about the past tense in English. I'll try to introduce terms gently, with links to sites with deeper explanations. At points I will be a bit sloppy and use more familiar (and less precise) terms (like past-tense). And I'm going to be very sloppy about phonetic spelling, both because not everyone knows the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and because if I tried to use the IPA we'd have to get into not-especially-relevant differences in pronunciation of many of these words. 

The origins of ed

Let's start by thinking a bit more about ed. Old English had different categories of verbs that were put into past tense (preterite) in various ways. The so-called strong verbs were those that changed their internal vowel. Some of those are still 'strong' in Modern English, like drink/drank and write/wrote

Those that ended with the (then multiple) suffixes that would eventually become ed are weak verbs. They don't undergo an internal change to make past tense; a suffix is just stuck on the end.

Nowadays, we think of strong verbs as "irregular verbs" and ed verbs as "regular" verbs, but back in Old English the verbs that we now think of as "irregular" fell into regular patterns in a more complex system. 

For centuries, English has been bending toward verb weakness. Many Old English "strong" verbs are now made past-tense with ed, like starved (rather than something like storve) and baked (not boke). 

But ed is only the spelling of the past-tense suffix

We tend to think of ed as the past-tense suffix because it's how it tends to be represented in spelling. That spelling makes it look like it has two sounds, but a common lesson in English Linguistics 101 is that spelling is misleading. Notice how we pronounce ed in the following words:
  • stopped, stoked, passed, slashed, torched = "stopt", "stokt", "past", "slasht", "torcht"
  • strobed, flogged, buzzed, judged, blamed, pinged = "strobd", "flogd", "buzzd", "judjd", "blamd", "pingd"

That is, each of these past tense forms is pronounced with one syllable. The ed does not represent a vowel+consonant combination. Buzzed isn't "buzz-ed", it's "buzzd". 

If you don't hear the difference between those, think about learned in these two contexts:

I learned a fact versus a learned scholar 

The first has one syllable ("lernd"), the second as two distinct syllables with a distinct vowel in the ed. That two-syllable learnéd (sometimes spelled/spelt with the accent mark) is a special case; it's an adjective, rather than a verb. We're going to stick to verbs, not adjectives in this post, but that adjective is handy for illustrating what we're not doing in words like buzzed. We're not pronouncing a vowel in ed.

Some other ed verbs do have a pronounced vowel in ed:

  • tasted, boarded, dated, padded, minded: each has two syllables.

If you start from the spelling, you might think that buzzed is buzz+ed and the E has got(ten) lost. But language doesn't start from spelling, it starts from sounds. Instead of the suffix being ed, with some weird places where the vowel is dropped, it makes more linguistic sense to see the suffix as d and to observe that we have rules for what to do when that [d] rubs up against other sounds in pronunciation. The rules are:

  • The [voiced] -d becomes [voicelesst when it follows a voiceless consonant sound. (We say it assimilates to voicelessness. Assimilation makes things easier to say quickly.)
  • A vowel is inserted (epenthesized) when we try to attach the suffix d to a /t/ or a /d/ sound. These consonants are pronounced by tapping the gum ridge behind the teeth with the tip of your tongue (they're alveolar plosives). and if we tried to pronounce them together, you'd not be able to hear them both. (In English, we would pronounce padd the same as pad.) So, inserting the vowel makes the doubled alveolar consonants pronounceable for the speaker and hearable for the listener. 
  • In all other cases, the suffix remains d in pronunciation.
Because we follow rules when we pronounce all those variants of -(e)d and nothing else changes, those are very regular verb endings. Notice that nothing major changes in the verb root. The a in taste is the same as the in tasted, and the in stop is the same as the o in stopped, etc. In the irregular verbs discussed below, that's not always the case. 

This all means means that the difference between learnt and learned is very small: just the difference between saying the [t] sound and saying the [d] sound. We're not saying more sounds if we say the version that's got more letters. 


Late additionMarianne Hundt reminds me that things are not always straightforward—there can be back and forth between regularization and irregularization in the timeline. What follows us just about where we are now.

t/d variation

Now we move to the ones that seem irregular in Modern English and whether they are the same in British and American English.

In each case, I've had a look at the Corpus of Global Web-Based English to see what percentage of the BrE/AmE usage is in the irregular form. So, where it says 98% in the first table for bent, it means that 98% of the examples are bent and 2% are bended. I've rounded all the percentages to the nearest whole number. 

Here, I'm only worrying about irregulars with a -t marking the past tense. If you're interested in other irregular past-tense forms, I have some other blog posts for you.

final d > t (no vowel change)

British and American English don't differ in using these irregulars:

Base form Past form AmE % BrE %
bend bent 98* 98*
lend lent 100 100
send sent100 100
   spend    spent 100 100

While we have a pattern here of end>ent, it's not a regularity. No one says tent as the past tense of tend, or ent as the past of end. I haven't tried searching for rend/rent because I'd be overwhelmed by the 'lease' meaning of rent.

*Bended is like learnéd, in that it's used as a participial adjective (as in on bended knee). So, the 2% or so of bended are a different thing. As a verb, everyone's saying bent: I bent the rules, not I bended the rules. 

-pt versus -ped with vowel change

Here we see AmE moving toward regularization for creep and leap, but not other rhyming verbs. Irregularity is easier to maintain in much-used verbs—we learn the irregular form because we hear it. When we go to make a past-tense for a verb we've heard less, we often have to make up a past-tense form on the spot, and that is most easily done with -ed. It's a bit surprising that wept is still so strong, considering it's the least-used of any of this set.

Base formPast formAmE %BrE %
creep crept 62 92
leapleapt5279
sleepslept100100
sweepswept100100
   weep    wept9998

These irregulars all have a vowel change in common: the -pt version has a "short E", while its -ed counterpart (creeped, sweeped) has a "long E"—even leapt, whose spelling seems to indicate otherwise. 

This case is different from other possible -pt endings, like slipt and stript. Since slipt is how slipped is actually pronounced (see above), slipt/slipped is just a spelling difference, not an irregular verb issue. (They are also spelled/spelt with a 'd: slipp'd and stripp'd.) The numbers for these are so low that they would show up as 0 in the table, but there's an interesting detail about those tiny numbers: slipt is only present in the GB corpus (6 times), and stript is only in the US corpus (10 times). 

-Nt versus -ned with vowel change  

In these ones, a final nasal consonant is followed by the -t suffix. The irregular forms also have a vowel change: the -Nt version has a "short E", while its -ed counterpart (leaned) has a "long E". 

AmE uses regulari{s/z}ed leaned, while BrE still mostly uses leant, but both have mostly regulari{s/z}ed dreamed, and no one is saying meaned

Base formPast formAmE %BrE %
dreamdreamt1633
leanleant375
meanmeant100100

I have to wonder if the loss of leant is related to its having homophones: lent, as a past tense of lend.

-rnt versus -rned 

These have no vowel change. So, in spoken language, the difference is between saying burnt and burnd.

Base formPast formAmE %BrE %
burnburnt2342
earnearnt03
learn  learnt444

These are a little tricky because burnt is more common than burned as an adjective (e.g. burnt offerings), and as we've already seen, there are some funny things going on with learned as an adjective. But it's hard to trust that automatic processes for the corpus have accurately tagged the adjective use, so I haven't used that tagging to come to the numbers above. They include everything.

I had the feeling that these differ in preterit (I learnt French) and perfect (I have learnt French) forms. So, I searched for these in the formula "PRONOUN [has/have/had] VERB+ed/t". The numbers for BrE irregulars go down in this condition (I tried it with other pronouns too), which tells us something, but I haven't got time to look into what it tells us. (Given that we no longer have the risk of errant adjectival learneds, I expected the percentage to go up!)

Past form AmE preterit AmE perfect BrE preterit BrE perfect
 burnt    17 21 33 39
learnt 3 6 31 36

So, I was right that there's more -rnt in the perfect than in the preterite, but it's a smaller gap than I'd thought I'd find. 

-led versus -lt

Finally, the Ls, one of which you've seen already in this post: spelled/spelt.
These fall into two categories, with and without vowel change. 

The vowel-changing ones are solidly in the "irregular" category, with a bit of movement in the rarest of those, kneel>knelt.

With vowel changePast formAmE %BrE %
dealdealt100100
feelfelt100100
kneelknelt8589

We see some of the biggest differences between AmE and BrE in the non-vowel-changing ones—with some caveats about homonyms below.

Without vowel changePast formAmE %BrE %
buildbuilt100100
dwelldwelt8683
smellsmelt1348*
spellspelt749
spillspilt1138^
spoilspoilt551

*Smelt is a bit tricky because it can be a verb in its own right (smelting metal) and it's also a fish that's eaten in North America. The corpus, however, is bad at distinguishing these things. The majority of smelts in the results reported here are the past tense of smell, but it would be too much work to tell you exactly how many.
smelt!

Spelt is another problem one because it is the name of a grain. I tried sorting out the noun uses from teh verb ones, but it turns out that most of the ones tagged as "noun" in the corpus are, in fact, instances of the verb. So the numbers here include all spelts. 

^In the case of spilt, I wondered how much adjectival use mattered, particularly in the phrase "cry over spilled/spilt milk".  So, I searched for "spilled/spilt milk" and found that Americans are pretty evenly split on spilled versus spilt in the phrase (36 hits vs 32), whereas in British English it was 76 versus 18 hits. Those spilt milks account for 14–18% of the spilt percentages above (which is to say, that phrase isn't adding much to the AmE/BrE difference).

miscellaneous irregulars 

There are a few more irregulars-ending-in-t; these ones end in fricative sounds. But it's not worth saying much about them, since they're much the same in British and American English.

leave>left: Everyone uses the irregular for this one. Where leaved happens, it has to do with leaves (like on a tree or a table), not leaving.  

vex>vext: The -t version is still playable in Scrabble, but the corpus tells us no one's using it in UK or US. I'm not even bothering to look for other verbs ending in x. 

dress>drest: No one's using this one either! But...

bless>blest: We find a bit more of this one, since old-fashioned spellings are common in religious language, either because they're quoted from long-ago translated scripture or because they're styled to sound like scripture. Still, only 2% of the AmE "past" forms are blest and only 1% of the BrE.  (I say "past" because a lot of them are probably adjectives.)

The moral of the story is...

While some -t spellings are more common in current BrE than in current AmE, it would be wrong to call them "the British spelling", with one exception: leant.  There we have clear evidence of a transatlantic divide where the -t version is the firm majority in the UK and the -ed version is much preferred in the US. 

In the other cases, there may be more preference for one or the other in US or UK, but the same forms have the majority/minority in both countries (at least in this corpus, which was collected 12 years ago). That is to say, you're much more likely to see spelt from a British writer than an American one, but an awful lot of British writers are writing spelled. Learnt will tell you that a document is almost certainly not American, but learned will not tell you that the writer isn't British—and so forth. 

24 comments

  1. Relevant to your comment about the influence of religious language, I suspect "Jesus wept" is helping to keep "weep" irregular.

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    1. As an interjection, more common in BrE than AmE. :)

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    2. I immediately thought this as well.

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  2. ‘The homophone lent’ = the past tense of loan? I do try to use the word ‘loaned’ here, thinking that I said ‘lent’ as a child, incorrectly.
    The 1842 song ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls’ springs to mind. Somehow it doesn’t scan in the form ‘I dreamed I dwelled’

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    1. I assumed she meant the 40 days Lent - but the past tense of loan is the one that catches me out...I think I often accidentally spell it leant...but my dialect definitely has she lent it to me, she loaned it to me doesn't track very well for me.

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    2. I confused myself on this one. I've clarified in the post.

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    3. I would think of "lent" as the past tense of "to lend"; the past tense of "loan" would be "loaned". Although "She loaned him her book" sounds odd to me - I'd always say/write "She lent him her book".

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    4. Sorry, yes. I have been trying to update things without thinking them through enough! So: what I meant was: leant (from lean) sounds like lent (from lend), and both are past-tense verbs.

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  3. And children, trying to get it right, sometimes get it a bit weird and wonderful. My younger grandson, some 7 or 8 years ago, told me enthusiastically that at nursery/daycare "I washded my hands and I satted on my chair!"

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  4. In Anthony Boucher's 1942 science fiction story Barrier, a time traveller from the forties finds himself in a future where there has been a reform of the English language in a book called This bees Speech. All verbs have been made regular and articles dropped. At one point he meets someone who knows him who says, "It's beed a long time."

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  5. Does this extend to words like obliged and obligated?

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    1. Both of those are regular past tenses, so no.

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  6. The area of Nottinghamshire in which I grew up has 'sempt' as the past tense of seem.

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    1. Cool! I can't find any 'sempt' in the corpus, and all the instances of 'semt' either refer to the time zone or are typos for 'sent'.

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    2. I don't know that I've ever seen it written down, but am nonetheless convinced that's how to spell it. The only place I wondered if I might have seen it is in something by DH Lawrence. I know his writing contains words I'd previously thought were used only by my family.

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  7. What's your take on transitive verbs like "wring"? I wring out my clothes. I wrung out my clothes (past tense). I see more "wringed" her hands than I do "wrung" her hands (I do see both, though). Is "wring" strong? Transitive verbs in general?

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    1. Verb weakness/strength is a separate issue from transitivity--the meanings of the verbs aren't really related to their past tense forms. (Notice that words like 'write' and 'eat' are strong, but can be either transitive or intransitive.)

      I haven't covered other strong verbs here, and I try to resist getting into new topics in the comments (see how to suggest new comments on the About page). But I will say: you're probably experiencing novelty bias in noticing that much 'wringed'. It accounts for less than 3% of the US data in the corpus I've cited above and none of the UK data.

      Click on the link to Corpus of Global Web-Based English in the post if you'd like to try out some others (it's free, but you need to register). To compare two verb forms put a / in between them when you do your search, e.g.: wringed/wrung.

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  8. Interesting that Dreamt, learnt, burnt and earnt are minority in both the US and UK. I'm in Australia and I would say the 't' version is the most common by far of each of these here.

    In fact learned and earned and burned sound 'wrong' to my ears almost like they are gramatically incorrect (even though I know they aren't.)

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    1. You can search for these in the same corpus I used. You're right that the -t versions are more common in Australia, but they're still the minority in print (which is all I can search). Half as much 'learnt' as 'learned'; a small amount of earnt (110 v 3051), but it's more common in Australia than elsewhere. 'Burnt' numbers really aren't trustable because of the adjectives, but if I look at the phrase 'has burned/burnt', there are 15 -t and 22 -ed.

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  9. Thank you Lynne for that really interesting explanation of something everyone does every day without noticing.

    As an older BrEnglish speaker, I do prefer to use the various 't' forms, and would normally read them aloud with 't's even if spelt/spelled with an 'ed'. I think that probably makes me a bit old-fashioned though. I do notice some people pronouncing 'learnt' as though it was/were pronounced 'learn'd'. I also, I think, hear 'dreamed' pronounced as though it was/were spelt 'dreemed' sometimes rather than dreamt pronounced 'dremt'. A query though whether its normal pronunciation is actually more like 'drempt' with a phantom 'p' inserted.

    They other query I would have is whether people are pronouncing all of the spellings that they or others have 'regularised' with 'd's rather than 't's. However people might spell it, I don't think I've ever normally heard anyone in speech pronounce the past of 'lean' as 'leaned'.

    As I'm involved in church activities, I'd particularly spell 'blest' 'blest' rather than 'blessed' so as to distinguish it from contexts where it has to be pronounced 'blesséd' either to scan correctly or because that's customary in the context.

    I do hear 'loan' used as a verb these days, with a past tense of 'loaned', rather than lend/lent but it still jars.

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    1. It's very normal in pronunciation to insert a 'p' between an 'm' and a 't', as a transition point between those very different consonants, keeping the 'm' from assimilating to the 't' and becoming 'n'.

      If one wanted to look at pronunciations, one could listen to a lot of instances of any of these words on Youglish (https://youglish.com/pronounce/dreamed/english/uk). The problem will be that they are sorted by automatic transcriptions—so I would guess that all the ones that one finds under 'dreamed' are pronounced with the long 'e', etc. But we don't know whether the person speaking was reading a 'dreamed' or a 'dreamt' in their script (or how they would have spelled/spelt it themselves).

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  10. A little bit tangential but one of the most common spelling mistakes I see is writing “lead” for “led”, presumably due to the fact that the metal is pronounced the same way

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  11. Or by analogy with read! (Annabel here, can't sign in from phone).

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AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)