Past Tense of “grow”
The past tense of grow is grew; the past participle is grown.
Why “grow” behaves this way
"Grow" descends from Old English "growan," part of the same ancient root family that gave English "green" and "grass" — all three ultimately trace back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning roughly "to become green" or "to sprout," which is why a plant literally "growing" and a lawn turning "green" share buried linguistic DNA even though a modern speaker would never guess the connection just from the words themselves.
As a strong verb, "grow" originally belonged to the reduplicating class (like "know" and "throw"), where the past tense once repeated part of the stem before that pattern simplified into the modern vowel-only alternation grow/grew/grown. The grow-green-grass connection is one of several places where English preserves an ancient semantic link — growth and greenness — that most speakers today experience only as separate, unrelated vocabulary. A handful of other English verbs kept the same reduplicating-turned-ablaut pattern, including "blow" and "know," though "grow" is unusual for how directly its modern figurative senses (business growth, personal growth) still echo the original literal sense of a living thing increasing in size.
The common confusion
The irregular forms themselves rarely trip anyone up; the real usage question is transitive versus intransitive "grow" — "she grew tomatoes" (transitive, someone caused the growing) versus "the tomatoes grew" (intransitive, they grew on their own) — the same verb form covering both roles without any change in spelling, which occasionally creates ambiguity about who or what is actually responsible for the growth in a given sentence.
How it's actually used
"Grow" combines productively with adjectives to describe a gradual change of state — "grow tired," "grow old," "grow confident" — a pattern grammarians call a linking or copular use, functionally similar to "become" but implying a slower, more gradual transition rather than a sudden one. The phrasal verb "grow up" specifically marks the transition from childhood to adulthood, while "grow into" describes gradually becoming suited to something (a role, a name, a piece of clothing) that didn't fit at first. Economists also use "grow" transitively in a specialized, sometimes criticized business sense — "grow the business," "grow revenue" — treating an abstract quantity as though it were a plant a person could cultivate, a usage some style guides still flag as jargon even though it has become thoroughly standard in corporate English. The compound "outgrow" describes surpassing something in size or maturity — outgrowing a habit, a friendship, or a pair of shoes — and always conjugates through the same grew/grown pattern as its base verb. Relationships and friendships are also commonly described as "growing apart," a spatial metaphor for gradual estrangement that uses the identical intransitive sense of unsupervised, natural change found in "the tomatoes grew."
Across the tense system
"Grown" functions independently as an adjective describing a fully matured state — "a grown man," "grown children" — distinct from its use as a verbal participle in perfect-tense sentences ("she has grown"), and this adjectival "grown" never takes an auxiliary verb the way the participle does.
Common real mistakes
The most common slip is "growed" as a nonstandard past tense, heard in some dialects and children's early speech before the irregular pattern is fully acquired. A separate real confusion is "grow" versus "raise" when talking about children — American English generally prefers "raise children" over "grow children," reserving "grown" mainly for describing the state of an adult ("all grown up"), while "grow" alone applied directly to people sounds slightly off outside that fixed phrase.
Examples
- The company grew rapidly after the merger.
- She has grown three inches this year.
- They grew up in the same small town.
- We had grown used to the noise by then.
- He grows vegetables in his backyard every summer.
- The business is growing faster than expected.
- It's grown into a serious problem.
- She grew tired of waiting.
Memory trick
Connect "grow" to "green" and "grass" as a single ancient family — all three share a buried root meaning "to sprout" — and remember that "grow" works the same way whether something grows itself (intransitive) or someone grows it (transitive), unlike verbs that need a different form for each role.