Past Tense – Regular Verbs

The past tense expresses actions that have happened in the past, events that have already happened. It can be used to talk about the past or something that we imagined in the past. We can understand it is the past when we have words like “last year, last night, last Tuesday, yesterday and ago”.

Firstly we need to understand that in the English language we have Regular and Irregular verbs. It is advised that you study the most commonly used irregular verbs. However for now we will focus on the regular verbs.

Regular verbs

To form the past tense we add the suffix (-ed) to most verbs, for example the verb “walk” becomes “walked”, “kick” becomes “kicked”.

Here are some examples of sentences,

“I walked to school yesterday”.
“The footballer kicked the ball into the net”.
“He cooked dinner”.
“It rained yesterday”.

We need to pay attention to verbs ending in “e”, for example “wipe”, “live” and “close”.

To form the past simple in this case we just add “-d” to the infinitive form of the verb,

verb + -d

I lived here in 2013. (live)
She closed the window. (close)
He wiped the floor. (wipe)

How to form the past simple with verbs ending in a “-y”

Lets look at verbs preceded by a consonant (spy, envy, study), the consonants being a p, v and d.

Here the Y becomes an I and we add -ed, for example,

He spied on his neighbours. (Spy)
She envied her cousin. (Envy)
They studied for the English exam. (Study).

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