Past Tense of “find”
The past tense of find is found; the past participle is found.
Why “find” behaves this way
"Find" descends from Old English "findan," a strong verb whose ablaut pattern shifted the vowel from i to a diphthong (later leveling to the modern "ou" in "found") for both the past tense and the participle — one of several English strong verbs, alongside "bind/bound," "grind/ground," and "wind/wound," that share this exact same historical vowel pattern because they all belonged to the same class of strong verb in Old English.
This i-to-ou vowel pattern is old enough that it's shared across the wider Germanic family too — German "finden/fand/gefunden" shows a related, though not identical, ablaut pattern, confirming that the irregularity predates English splitting off as its own separate Germanic language rather than being something that developed independently within English.
The common confusion
The main confusion is spelling-related rather than grammatical: writers occasionally reach for "found" as if it needed an extra -ed ("founded"), but "founded" is actually a separate, unrelated regular verb meaning "established" (as in "founded a company"), not a variant spelling of found/find's past tense.
How it's actually used
"Find" and "find out" are a commonly confused pair: plain "find" means to locate something physical or existing ("I found my keys"), while the phrasal verb "find out" means to discover information ("I found out the truth") — using plain "find" where "find out" is meant ("I found that he was lying" instead of "I found out that he was lying") is a frequent non-native-speaker slip, though "find that" is also acceptable in more formal registers to mean "discover/conclude." "Find" also introduces an evaluative judgment in a distinctive complement pattern — "I find this surprising," "we found the movie boring" — where "find" doesn't mean literally locating something but reporting a personal reaction, a construction that pairs an object directly with an adjective describing the speaker's assessment of it.
Across the tense system
"Found" appears in the fixed legal/formal phrase "the court found him guilty," where "find" means "to determine officially" rather than "to locate," a specialized sense that survives mostly in legal and formal registers alongside the everyday physical sense of finding a lost object. In its evaluative sense, "find" tends to appear overwhelmingly in the present tense across reviews and personal opinions ("I find it hard to believe"), while the past tense "found" in the same evaluative sense more often reports a completed judgment about something already experienced ("I found the book surprisingly good"), a subtle but real difference in how the two tenses get used in practice.
Common real mistakes
Using plain "find" where the phrasal verb "find out" is meant is a frequent error — "I found he was lying" instead of "I found out he was lying" — though "I found that he was lying" is an accepted, more formal alternative that avoids the phrasal verb entirely. A subtler stylistic issue rather than an outright error is overusing "find" as a hedge in academic and business writing — "we find that," "studies find" — which is grammatically fine but can read as vague filler if it isn't followed promptly by the specific result being reported, a pattern style guides for scientific and technical writing often flag for tightening.
Examples
- I found my keys under the couch.
- She has found a new apartment.
- We found out the news yesterday.
- Have you found what you were looking for?
- They had found a solution before anyone else noticed the problem.
- He finds it hard to relax on vacation.
- I can't find my glasses.
- We're finding new ways to save money.
Memory trick
Group "find" with "bind," "grind," and "wind" — all four share the identical i-to-ou vowel shift (bound, ground, wound) — and keep "founded" (a separate, regular verb meaning "established") mentally apart from "found." Keep the evaluative use of "find" ("I find this odd," a personal judgment) mentally separate from the literal use ("I found my keys," a physical discovery) — same verb, two genuinely different jobs. A further fixed idiom, "find fault," means to criticize persistently, a figurative sense distinct from both the literal and evaluative uses already covered.