Shined or shone? 4 tricky past tenses

No matter how long you’ve been speaking English, no matter how hard you’ve worked to perfect your grammar, some past tense verbs can stump you.

For example, the day after you decide to grin and bear it, would you say “I grinned and bore it?” Beared? Born?

That shiny car you saw yesterday, would you say it shined as it drove by? Or it shone?

Would you say you weaved baskets or that you wove them?

The questions are frightening, but luckily the answers aren’t far out of reach. Dictionaries list past-tense and past participle forms for every irregular verb. So you can always look them up — if you know how.

Here's my recent column that looks at four verbs with tricky past tenses: shine, weave, bear and bare.

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