Past Tense: '-ed' vs. '-t'

Welcome to another installment of How Could you be so Chartless, a series the name of which I’m constantly thinking of changing, where I look at how language has changed using Google Ngram Viewer. As I mentioned in my article tracing the change from ‘chuse’ to ‘choose,’ I noticed while I was reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen that she spelled the past tense of ‘drop’ not as the familiar ‘dropped’ but ‘dropt’. This was thrilling, but I shouldn’t have been surprised because for the last couple of months I’d been singing a hymn which referred to God as ‘blest’ instead of ‘blessed’. 

Now, the past tense is (usually) indicated by appending an ‘ed’ to the end of the word. The word ‘drop’ becomes ‘dropped’, and ‘stop’ becomes ‘stopped’. But if you look back to the 18th century, when Jane Austen was writing, there’s about equal usage of ‘dropt’ and ‘stopt’. Plotted below are the ‘-ed’ and ‘-t’ ending for both ‘drop’ and ‘stop’ from 1650 to 2019. These two words are fairly representative of the trend for most verbs. Initially, there is about the same degree of usage for both ‘-ed’ and ‘-t’, but by the mid 1800s the ‘-t’ ending is essentially extinct, completely overtaken by the ‘-ed’ ending.   

However, some ‘-t’ endings are able to survive encroachment from new ‘-ed’ endings. These are the words that drove me crazy when I was trying to learn grammar rules. Instead of the nice, simple, and as I was told, formulaic ‘-ed’ ending, words like ‘buy’ and ‘build’ are irregular. Because they were historically more common, we’ve maintained the use of ‘built’ and ‘bought’ to the present day. A fascinating historical aside, the King James Version (KJV) often had the power to shape the English language. Like the works of Shakespeare, many idioms originating in the KJV are still in use today. Strangely, the KJV uses both ‘built’ and ‘builded’, for reasons I don’t understand. Hebrews 3:4 reads, ‘For every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God.’ Compared to ‘buyed’ which is never used in the KJV, ‘builded’ does have some usage before completely fading.

This brings me to one of my (now) favorite words in the English language: ‘dream’. Most verbs follow a path like either of the two graphs above; either the ‘-ed’ ending slowly takes over from the ‘-t’ ending, or the ‘-t’ ending dominates from 1650 until today. ‘Dream’ (and to a somewhat lesser extent ‘spill’) is exciting because it’s still in flux. Typically, language is old and stable, or new and dynamic, but ‘dreamed’ and ‘dreamt’ are old and dynamic. While dreamed is more popular, dreamt, instead of being completely eliminated, is still a common enough usage that spell checkers will autocorrect to it.

This is what I wish I’d learned when I was struggling in elementary school. Language is not as rigid as I thought it was, it moves and is reborn in every new speaker. We don’t say ‘bought’ instead of ‘buyed’ because of anything unique to ‘buy’, but because ‘buy’ was a common enough word when everything had a ‘-t’ ending. Hopefully, if ‘dreamt’ ever does go extinct, people stumbling upon it in works from today can be reminded that language is ever ancient and ever new.