Past Tense of “get”
The past tense of get is got; the past participle is gotten (American English) / got (British English).
Why “get” behaves this way
"Get" was borrowed into English from Old Norse "geta" during the centuries of Viking settlement in England (roughly the 9th-11th centuries), since Old English had no strong native equivalent covering the same range of meanings. As a strong verb, it kept an ablaut-style vowel change into "got," and originally had "gotten" as its participle throughout English. British English later dropped "gotten" in favor of reusing "got" for both forms, while American English preserved "gotten" as the older form — one of the clearest and most commonly cited splits between the two dialects.
"Gotten" hasn't disappeared entirely from British English — it survives in the fixed phrase "ill-gotten gains," a fossil of the older participle preserved specifically because the phrase itself is old and resistant to change, even in a dialect that otherwise abandoned "gotten" for everyday use centuries ago.
The common confusion
The American/British split causes real confusion for learners: "I have gotten better at this" is standard, expected American English, while the identical sentence would sound old-fashioned or slightly off to many British speakers, who would say "I have got better at this" instead — neither is wrong, they're simply two different regional standards that diverged from the same historical form.
How it's actually used
"Get" is one of the most semantically flexible verbs in English, covering obtaining ("get a coffee"), becoming ("get tired"), arriving ("get home"), and understanding ("get the joke") — a range so broad that some style guides discourage overusing "get" in formal writing in favor of more precise verbs ("obtain," "become," "arrive," "understand"). It also anchors dozens of phrasal verbs (get up, get over, get along, get away with) that each carry an idiomatic meaning unrelated to "get" in isolation. Because "get" covers so much semantic ground, formal style guides in journalism and academic writing often recommend replacing it with a more specific verb wherever the sentence allows, treating heavy reliance on "get" as a marker of casual or underdeveloped prose rather than as an outright grammatical fault.
Across the tense system
"Get" combines with a past participle to form a common, more casual alternative to the passive voice: "the window got broken" versus the more formal "the window was broken" — both are grammatically passive constructions, but the "get-passive" tends to appear in speech and informal writing, while the "be-passive" dominates formal registers. "Get" also forms an unusually large number of fixed idioms tied to specific tenses and moods — "get going," "get real," "get lost" (as an imperative telling someone to leave) — where the verb's literal sense of obtaining or becoming has faded almost entirely into pure idiom, making these phrases something learners generally have to memorize as whole units rather than parse compositionally from "get" plus its complement.
Common real mistakes
"I have got" vs. "I have gotten" is the most common real point of confusion, since both are grammatically valid but belong to different dialects (British vs. American English respectively) — using the "wrong" one for your audience isn't an error exactly, but it does read as slightly off to readers expecting their own dialect's convention. A further, purely stylistic issue rather than a grammatical error is overusing "get" as an all-purpose verb in formal writing — "got the job done," "got better," "got there" — which most style guides flag not because any of these are wrong, but because a more specific verb (completed, improved, arrived) usually reads as more precise and less repetitive across a longer piece of writing.
Examples
- She got the job after three interviews.
- I have gotten used to the new schedule. (American English)
- I have got used to the new schedule. (British English)
- He gets home around six most days.
- They had gotten everything ready before the guests arrived.
- We got lucky with the weather.
- Let's get started.
- She's getting better at chess.
Memory trick
If you're writing for an American audience, "gotten" is the safe, standard participle; if you're writing for a British audience, use "got" for both — and remember "ill-gotten gains" as the one fossil phrase where British English kept "gotten" anyway.