Past Tense of “bring”
The past tense of bring is brought; the past participle is brought.
Why “bring” behaves this way
"Bring" comes from Old English "bringan," which is unusual among English verbs in that Old English texts show it wavering between strong and weak conjugation patterns before eventually settling into the irregular weak form "brohte" (later "brought") that survives today — a genuine case of a verb caught between two systems during the transition period, rather than a clean example of either pattern, which is part of why "brought" doesn't obviously look like either a typical strong-verb vowel swap or a typical weak-verb -ed ending.
"Brought" belongs to the same small "-ght" family as "thought," "caught," "taught," and "fought" — all descended from verbs that once carried a rough, throat-clearing consonant in the middle, roughly the sound of a German "ch" or a Scottish "loch," which Middle English speakers pronounced clearly but which vanished from most English accents by the early modern period, leaving only the spelling as its fossil record.
The common confusion
The real confusion with "bring" is bring vs. take, governed by point of view (bring moves toward the speaker's location or the location being discussed; take moves away from it) rather than by any grammatical rule about the verb's form — "bring it here" but "take it there" is the reliable test.
How it's actually used
"Bring" combines with a wide set of particles to form phrasal verbs with meanings that shift substantially from the base verb — "bring up" (raise a topic, or raise a child), "bring about" (cause), "bring down" (reduce, or topple) — each of which has to be learned as its own idiomatic unit rather than derived compositionally from "bring" plus the particle's literal meaning. "Bring" also appears in the fixed idiom "bring to mind," meaning to recall or evoke a memory or association, a figurative use distinct from its literal sense of physically transporting an object, alongside "bring to an end," meaning to conclude something, where "bring" again functions abstractly rather than describing physical movement.
Across the tense system
"Brought" appears in the fixed phrase "brought to light," meaning "revealed" or "made public," a specialized figurative sense distinct from "bring" describing the literal physical transport of an object from one place to another. The passive "was brought up" specifically describes upbringing ("she was brought up in a small town"), a fixed idiomatic sense entirely separate from the literal sense of "bring," which describes carrying an object from one place to another, and one of the clearest examples of how far a phrasal verb built on "bring" can drift from its base meaning.
Common real mistakes
Mixing up "bring" and "take" by point of view is the most common real error — telling someone "I'll bring it to your house" is correct only if the speaker is already heading toward that house; if describing movement away from their own current location, "take" is the grammatically expected verb instead. A further nonstandard but common spoken form is "brung" ("I brung it with me"), a dialectal past tense that survives in some regional and informal varieties of English by false analogy with strong verbs like "sing/sung" and "ring/rung" — "bring" was never actually part of that ablaut class historically, which is exactly why "brung" is treated as nonstandard rather than as a legitimate irregular alternative.
Examples
- She brought a gift to the party.
- They have brought up the same concern before.
- He brought his laptop to the meeting.
- We were brought up in the same town.
- It would have brought more attention to the issue.
- Have you brought everything you need?
- That brings back memories.
- They're bringing extra chairs for the guests.
Memory trick
Say "brought" as rhyming with "thought," not "brung" or "bringed" — both nonstandard forms some dialects use, but standard English keeps only the one irregular "brought," sharing its "-ght" fossil spelling with "thought" and "caught." File "bring to mind" and "bring to an end" as figurative idioms built on "bring," both a long way from its literal sense of physically carrying something from one place to another.