Irregular Past Tense

Many verbs in English have an irregular past tense. This lesson introduces some of the more common ones.

The English verb be is very irregular in both the present and past tense. The following table shows the past tense of the verb be.

I was
he was
she was
it was
we were
you were
they were

Examples

I was at the store.
He was tired.
They were happy.
We were at home.
Were they at the beach?
They were not at the beach.
The car was dirty.
The windows were dirty.

A lot of other very common English verbs also have an irregular past tense. The following table shows the past tense for some very common English verbs. Unlike for the verb be, there is only one form of the past tense for these verbs.

Verb	Past Tense
bring	brought
buy	bought
choose	chose
do	did
drink	drank
eat	ate
find	found
go	went
get	got
give	gave
have	had
hold	held
make	made
run	ran
sit	sat
say	said
stand	stood
take	took
tell	told
think	thought

Examples

We brought some cookies.
She drank the coffee.
I found the keys.
The cat sat by the window.
I thought you said something.