Past Tense of “hurt”
The past tense of hurt is hurt; the past participle is hurt.
Why “hurt” behaves this way
"Hurt" entered English from Old French "hurter" (to strike, collide, or knock against something), a verb still alive today in modern French "heurter." When English borrowed it in the 13th century, "hurt" was folded into the native weak-verb pattern, but because its stem already ended in a "t" sound, adding the regular "-ed" ending would have produced an awkward doubled consonant sound that never caught on in speech — so English speakers simply left the verb unchanged in its past forms, giving "hurt" its modern zero-change conjugation (hurt/hurt/hurt).
This same "-ed becomes silent/redundant on a stem already ending in t or d" pattern explains several other English zero-change verbs, including "cut," "set," and "cast" — none of these are ancient Old English strong verbs at all; they're historically regular verbs that lost their visible past-tense ending simply because adding it would have been phonetically redundant, a completely different mechanism from the ablaut vowel-shifting that produces irregularity in verbs like "sing/sang/sung."
The common confusion
The conjugation itself gives no one pause, since all three slots are identical; the real usage nuance is transitive versus intransitive "hurt" — "she hurt her knee" (transitive, an action done to something) versus "my knee hurts" (intransitive, describing a state) — both spelled and conjugated identically, which occasionally leaves ambiguous who or what is actually causing the pain in a loosely worded sentence.
How it's actually used
"Hurt" extends comfortably into emotional and figurative pain alongside physical injury — "that comment hurt," "it hurts to admit it" — without any change in form, a flexibility "injure" and "wound" don't share, since both of those are reserved almost exclusively for literal physical harm in standard usage. The idiom "it wouldn't hurt to..." is a common hedge introducing a mild suggestion ("it wouldn't hurt to ask"), where "hurt" has faded almost entirely from its literal sense of pain into a marker of low-risk advice. Sports commentary uses "hurting" loosely to describe a team performing poorly ("they're really hurting after that loss"), a figurative extension distinct from both the literal physical sense and the more common emotional sense, showing how flexible this short, ancient French borrowing has become in casual English. "Hurt feelings" as a fixed adjectival phrase treats the past participle as a straightforward descriptor of an emotional state, parallel to how "hurting" functions as an adjective describing someone currently suffering, whether physically or emotionally.
Across the tense system
"Hurt" as a stative, intransitive verb describing ongoing pain ("my knee hurts," "it still hurts") behaves differently in the progressive than its transitive, active sense ("she is hurting him") — the intransitive use resists the progressive in casual speech about lasting pain but allows it in the emotionally figurative sense ("he's hurting right now," meaning suffering emotionally), a genuine split in how the same zero-change verb behaves depending on which sense is meant.
Common real mistakes
Because "hurt" never changes form, there's little room for a conjugation error, but learners occasionally add "-ed" by analogy with regular verbs, producing the nonstandard "hurted" — a mistake common in early language acquisition, similar to "goed" or "runned." A separate, more subtle confusion is choosing between "hurt," "harm," and "injure" in formal writing, where "injure" and "harm" often read as more precise and less casual than all-purpose "hurt," especially in medical, legal, or journalistic contexts describing specific physical damage.
Examples
- She hurt her ankle during the race.
- He has hurt himself before doing that exact move.
- They hurt each other's feelings without meaning to.
- My back had hurt for weeks before I saw a doctor.
- It hurts when I laugh too hard.
- Nothing was hurt except my pride.
- It wouldn't hurt to double-check the numbers.
- She's hurting after the loss.
Memory trick
Group "hurt" with "cut," "set," and "cast" as verbs that never needed a visible past-tense ending at all, because their stem already ends in a sound that would make "-ed" redundant to pronounce — one mental category covers all four at once.