Past Tense of “bid”
The past tense of bid is bid (to offer a price) / bade (to command, archaic); the past participle is bid (to offer a price) / bidden (to command, archaic).
Why “bid” behaves this way
English "bid" is the historical merger of two originally separate Old English verbs: "beodan" (to offer, proclaim), a strong verb, and "biddan" (to ask, command, pray), also strong but from a different ablaut class — their sounds converged over centuries until modern English speakers treat "bid" as a single verb, even though it still preserves two distinct conjugation patterns depending on which historical sense is meant: "bid/bid/bid" for offering a price (from "beodan"), and the archaic "bid/bade/bidden" for commanding or inviting (from "biddan").
The archaic commanding sense survives today mainly in the fixed, slightly old-fashioned phrase "bid farewell" or "bid someone welcome," and in the noun "bidding" meaning a command ("do their bidding") — both fossils of the older, now largely obsolete "biddan" sense, while the everyday auction and card-game sense of "bid" (offering a price or a number of tricks) comes entirely from the unrelated "beodan."
The common confusion
The confusion is knowing which historical sense applies: for auctions, contracts, and card games, modern English uses zero-change "bid/bid/bid" exclusively; the older, more literary "bade/bidden" survives only in fixed phrases like "bid farewell" and shouldn't be extended to ordinary financial or competitive bidding.
How it's actually used
"Bid" in business and government contracting names an entire specialized process ("submit a bid," "the bidding process"), distinct from the everyday sense of simply offering an amount at an auction. In card games like bridge, "bid" describes declaring how many tricks a player expects to win, a specialized competitive sense with its own strict rules and terminology. Real estate transactions rely heavily on "bid" as precise technical vocabulary ("a winning bid," "bid on a house"), a financial sense distinct from the archaic commanding sense discussed above. "Bidding war," describing competing buyers repeatedly raising their offers against one another, is a common modern idiom built directly on the auction sense of the verb. Freelance and contract work platforms use "bid" as standard vocabulary for proposing a price on a job listing, extending the traditional auction sense into the modern gig economy.
Across the tense system
"Bidden" appears almost exclusively in the fixed, formal phrase "unbidden" (uninvited, unprompted, as in "an unbidden thought crossed her mind"), a far more common modern survival of the archaic participle than any ordinary affirmative use of "bidden" itself. Government procurement processes distinguish an "open bid" (any qualified party may compete) from a "sealed bid" (offers are submitted confidentially and compared at once), two formal procedural terms built directly on the verb's contractual sense discussed above.
Common real mistakes
A frequent error is using "bidded" as a mistaken regular past tense for the auction/contract sense, when standard English keeps that sense entirely unchanged as "bid." Learners occasionally also confuse the two historical senses, producing hybrids like "she bade two hundred dollars" for an auction context, where plain "bid" is the only correct choice. Learners sometimes also blur "bid" together with "offer": both can describe proposing a price, but "bid" specifically implies a competitive context with other potential buyers, while "offer" doesn't necessarily imply any competition at all. A final subtlety: in card games, players sometimes confuse "bid" with "call," though the two aren't always interchangeable, since some games reserve "bid" strictly for a numeric declaration and "call" for other kinds of verbal signals during play.
Examples
- She bid two hundred dollars on the antique clock.
- They have bid on every contract this quarter.
- He bid farewell to his colleagues before retiring. (archaic sense)
- We had bid our goodbyes long before the party ended.
- The company bids competitively on government contracts.
- She was bidden to appear before the council. (archaic/formal)
- He's bidding on a rare stamp collection.
- The auctioneer accepted the highest bid.
Memory trick
Keep the two histories of "bid" separate: auctions and contracts use unchanging "bid/bid/bid," while the archaic commanding sense (bid farewell, bidden to appear) uses the older bade/bidden pattern — if money or a card game is involved, it's always plain "bid."