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
- 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 [voiceless] ‑t 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.
Late addition: Marianne 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
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.
final d > t (no vowel change)
Base form | Past form | AmE % | BrE % |
---|---|---|---|
bend | bent | 98* | 98* |
lend | lent | 100 | 100 |
send | sent | 100 | 100 |
spend | spent | 100 | 100 |
-pt versus -ped with vowel change
Base form | Past form | AmE % | BrE % |
---|---|---|---|
creep | crept | 62 | 92 |
leap | leapt | 52 | 79 |
sleep | slept | 100 | 100 |
sweep | swept | 100 | 100 |
weep | wept | 99 | 98 |
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 form Past form AmE % BrE % dream dreamt 16 33 lean leant 3 75 mean meant 100 100
Base form | Past form | AmE % | BrE % |
---|---|---|---|
dream | dreamt | 16 | 33 |
lean | leant | 3 | 75 |
mean | meant | 100 | 100 |
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
-rnt versus -rned
These have no vowel change. So, in spoken language, the difference is between saying burnt and burnd.
Base form Past form AmE % BrE % burn burnt 23 42 earn earnt 0 3 learn learnt 4 44
Base form | Past form | AmE % | BrE % |
---|---|---|---|
burn | burnt | 23 | 42 |
earn | earnt | 0 | 3 |
learn | learnt | 4 | 44 |
Past form | AmE preterit | AmE perfect | BrE preterit | BrE perfect |
---|---|---|---|---|
burnt | 17 | 21 | 33 | 39 |
learnt | 3 | 6 | 31 | 36 |
-led versus -lt
With vowel change | Past form | AmE % | BrE % |
---|---|---|---|
deal | dealt | 100 | 100 |
feel | felt | 100 | 100 |
kneel | knelt | 85 | 89 |
Without vowel change | Past form | AmE % | BrE % |
---|---|---|---|
build | built | 100 | 100 |
dwell | dwelt | 86 | 83 |
smell | smelt | 13 | 48* |
spell | spelt | 7 | 49† |
spill | spilt | 11 | 38^ |
spoil | spoilt | 5 | 51 |
![]() |
smelt! |
comment catcher!
ReplyDeleteRelevant to your comment about the influence of religious language, I suspect "Jesus wept" is helping to keep "weep" irregular.
ReplyDeleteAs an interjection, more common in BrE than AmE. :)
DeleteI immediately thought this as well.
Delete‘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.
ReplyDeleteThe 1842 song ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls’ springs to mind. Somehow it doesn’t scan in the form ‘I dreamed I dwelled’
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.
DeleteI confused myself on this one. I've clarified in the post.
DeleteI 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".
DeleteSorry, 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.
DeleteAnd 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!"
ReplyDeleteIn 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."
ReplyDeleteDoes this extend to words like obliged and obligated?
ReplyDeleteBoth of those are regular past tenses, so no.
DeleteThe area of Nottinghamshire in which I grew up has 'sempt' as the past tense of seem.
ReplyDeleteCool! 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'.
DeleteI 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.
DeleteWhat'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?
ReplyDeleteVerb 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.)
DeleteI 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteIn fact learned and earned and burned sound 'wrong' to my ears almost like they are gramatically incorrect (even though I know they aren't.)
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.
DeleteThank you Lynne for that really interesting explanation of something everyone does every day without noticing.
ReplyDeleteAs 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.
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'.
DeleteIf 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).
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
ReplyDeleteOr by analogy with read! (Annabel here, can't sign in from phone).
ReplyDelete