Practice the Top 100 ED verbs | Part 3 of 4

Learning the ED ending for Regular Verbs

There are three different ways to pronounce the –ed ending at the end of regular past tense verbs.

The three regular past tense verbs sounds:   

• One should end in a –d or a –t (e.g., want, need).
• One should end in a vowel or a voiced consonant (e.g., cleaned, saved, enjoyed).
• Finally, one should end in a voiceless consonant (e.g., laugh, finish, stop).

Use the “Listen Practice.” at the top of the page. Focus on listening to the final sound of each verb. See if you can tell what sound you heard for each verb. Then try enunciating the sound of the past tense ending several times.

In English, there are three different pronunciations of the –ed ending for regular past tense verbs. The pronunciation of the –ed ending depends on the final sound in the verb:

If the verb ends in a –d or a –t, the –ed ending is pronounced as a new syllable, /id/

If the verb ends in an unvoiced consonant (p, k, f, gh, sh, ch, ss, c, x), then the –ed ending sounds like a /t/ and does not create a new syllable.

If the verb ends in a vowel sound or a voiced consonant (l, n, r, b, g, m, z, s, v), then the –ed ending sounds like a /d/ and does not create a new syllable.

Conclusion

The three sounds that make up ed verbs are /t/, /d/, and /id/. They must be mastered to be correctly pronounced. Each sound has a different rule for how it is added to the end of a word. See the image below to examine these rules.