Past Tense of “broadcast”
The past tense of broadcast is broadcast (broadcasted also accepted); the past participle is broadcast (broadcasted also accepted).
Why “broadcast” behaves this way
"Broadcast" began life in the 18th century as an agricultural term, a compound of "broad" plus "cast" (to throw), describing the practice of scattering seed widely by hand across a field rather than planting it in narrow rows. Because it inherited its conjugation from "cast" (cast/cast/cast), the zero-change verb "broadcast" carried that same unchanging pattern into the 20th century, when radio and later television engineers repurposed the word for transmitting a signal widely — a case of an old farming metaphor becoming the standard term for an entirely new communication technology almost overnight.
This agricultural-to-media leap happened remarkably fast once radio became a mass medium in the 1920s, and the metaphor was so apt — scattering a signal widely, just as a farmer scatters seed — that the original farming sense of "broadcast" is now largely unfamiliar to most modern English speakers, who encounter the word almost exclusively in its media sense.
The common confusion
The form itself is settled, tracking "cast" closely, though "broadcasted" has become increasingly accepted, especially in casual and business writing ("broadcasted a message to the team"), even though many style guides still prefer the traditional zero-change "broadcast" for both slots.
How it's actually used
"Broadcast" has extended well beyond radio and television into general business and technology vocabulary — "broadcast an email," "broadcast a message to all followers" — describing any wide, one-to-many distribution of information, a natural expansion of the original media sense into digital communication. Social media platforms specifically use "broadcast" as a technical term for a live, one-way video stream, distinct from an interactive conversation. Podcasting and streaming services have extended "broadcast" loosely to describe on-demand audio and video content, even though technically a broadcast implies simultaneous transmission to many listeners at once, unlike content a listener chooses to access at any time — a small but real technical distinction that casual usage increasingly blurs.
Across the tense system
"Broadcast" in the passive voice ("the game was broadcast nationally") is the standard construction in journalism and media history describing how widely a program reached its audience, a use so common that the passive form is often more familiar to readers than any active sentence with a clear broadcasting subject. Emergency alert systems use "broadcast" as precise regulatory vocabulary describing officially mandated public warnings, a formal governmental use distinct from ordinary entertainment programming even though both rely on the same underlying transmission technology.
Common real mistakes
The main real issue is inconsistency between "broadcast" and "broadcasted" within the same piece of writing, since both are now accepted but a single document should commit to one form throughout. A separate, minor confusion is assuming "broadcast" always implies television or radio specifically, when its modern usage has broadened considerably to cover any wide digital distribution of a message. A further stylistic issue some writers face is overusing "broadcast" as a vague synonym for any kind of communication, when a more specific verb like "announce," "publish," or "share" might better capture the intended scale and medium of the message being sent. A final point some writers miss is that "broadcast" implies a one-way transmission to a wide audience, and using it to describe a two-way conversation or a message sent to a single recipient stretches the word beyond its normal, broadcast-specific sense.
Examples
- The station broadcast the game live across three states.
- They have broadcast this program every Sunday for a decade.
- She broadcasted the announcement to the entire company. (increasingly accepted)
- We had broadcast the emergency alert within minutes of the warning.
- The network broadcasts the news at six and eleven each day.
- Farmers once broadcast seed by hand across open fields. (agricultural sense)
- They're broadcasting the ceremony live online.
- The signal was broadcast to millions of households.
Memory trick
Remember "broadcast" borrows its unchanging conjugation directly from "cast/cast/cast," and connect its media sense back to the older farming image of scattering seed widely — a broadcast signal is, historically, just seed thrown broadly across a field of listeners.