Mind Your -ed’s
The English verb ending -ed is a curious construction.
Although always spelled -ed, it has three different pronunciations. Two of them can lead to misspellings:
/ed/ as in faded
/d/ as in turned
/t/ as in wrecked
The suffix -ed is the sign of the past tense. That is, most English verbs form their past tenses by adding -ed. For example, walk/walked, love/loved, sneeze/sneezed. The same ending marks the simple past tense and the perfect: Yesterday I walked. I have walked for hours.
In earlier periods, English verbs presented more variety in the way they formed the simple past and the past participle. A few of the older forms survive in what the grammar books call “irregular” verbs. These verbs do not form their past tenses by adding -ed:
sing sang (have) sung
give gave (have) given
write wrote (have) written
These “irregular” verbs are sometimes called “strong” verbs. Once very numerous in English, only a few survive–fewer than 70. Many of them, like help, became -ed verbs long ago so we no longer say holp or holpen. Some of the survivors, like wake and dive, are in the process of changing and the old and new forms are both in use:
He woke the baby. or He waked the baby.
He dove from the top board. or He dived into the pool.
One changing form that makes me sad is “slayed” for “slew.” The characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer made the -ed form current. My view is that “slay” is an old-fashioned word that deserves old-fashioned past forms. If I ever slay a vampire, I will say that I have slain it, and I want the reporters to say that I slew it.
And speaking of “old-fashioned,” don’t commit the error of leaving off the -ed when it is called for. Don’t write “old-fashion girl” for “old-fashioned girl,” or “I was suppose to go home early” for “I was supposed to go home early.”
Maeve on July 4, 2007 
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excelent!
Interesting about the forms that are changing like woke and waked.
hi team:
i’ve been reading daily writing tips from the beginning and enjoy most all of your posts. I particularly enjoyed the “mind your ed’s” post. I learned a lot from it. I wanted to write to you and tell you that you inspired me to start a blog of my own about sex, love and fantasy. I’m hoping to build it into something special and I’m really excited about its potential. I’m looking forward to your next post. There is one request i have, please don’t make your post soooooooooo long, i only have so much time after a long day at work. Thanks, john card.
John, got it! Thanks for the nice words.
Funny to see a post on this topic now.
Just a few nights ago my mates and I had an argument over the poker table about the correct past tense of the word “fold”
“Folded” seems to be an accepted word in poker jargon but is this a real word? We couldn’t figure it out!
Ops! ed is my biggest problem in writing!
Thanks for sharing.
Mind Your -ed’s
Mind your apostrophes..
Kate,
I suppose you mean that I should have written Mind Your -eds instead of Mind Your -ed’s. That would probably have been clear because of the hyphen. But what if I’d wanted to write about the letter “i”? What would readers make of Mind Your is?
We could save much apostrophe confusion by refusing to use an apostrophe to indicate any kind of plural. Usage like the following, however, is very common in textbooks:
Actually your remark comes as I’m struggling with this very thing. I frequently write about words and parts of words so I need a clear way to denote their plurals without confusing the reader. Clearly I can’t write Mind Your is, but I could write Mind Your “i”s.