Past Tense of “leap”
The past tense of leap is leaped (leapt in British English); the past participle is leaped (leapt in British English).
Why “leap” behaves this way
"Leap" comes from Old English "hleapan," which originally meant not just "to jump" but more broadly "to run" or "to move quickly" — a wider sense that survives today only in the specialized athletic term "leapfrog," a distant echo of "hleapan"'s original, broader meaning of swift movement rather than a single jump. Like "lean" and "dream," "leap" historically belonged to the small class of English weak verbs that shortened their vowel and took a "-t" ending in the past tense, producing "leapt" alongside the fully regularized "leaped."
"Leap year," meaning the year with the extra day, gets its name from a related but distinct sense of "leap": in a leap year, a fixed date "leaps" forward two days of the week instead of the usual one, because of the inserted February 29th — a genuinely different, more abstract use of "leap" describing a calendar irregularity rather than physical jumping. The same Old Norse-influenced athletic vocabulary that shaped "leapfrog" also produced the once-common noun "leap," describing a single jump as a discrete unit of distance, still used today in phrases like "by leaps and bounds."
The common confusion
As with "lean," the confusion is dialectal rather than grammatical: "leaped" dominates in American English while "leapt" remains common and standard in British English, and neither form is incorrect — the choice is simply a matter of matching regional convention rather than avoiding a genuine mistake.
How it's actually used
"Leap" extends into a large number of figurative expressions describing sudden change or decisive action — "leap to conclusions," "leap at the chance," "a leap of faith," "quantum leap" — none involving literal jumping but all keeping the identical leaped/leapt conjugation. In finance and statistics, "leap" describes a sudden sharp increase ("prices leaped 20% overnight"), a metaphorical use of upward jumping applied to numbers rather than bodies. Computer science borrowed "leap" for the technical term "leapfrogging," describing one technology bypassing an intermediate stage entirely to reach a more advanced one directly, a modern specialized sense built on the children's game "leapfrog" rather than on the verb's literal athletic meaning. Track and field and gymnastics preserve "leap" as a formal technical term, with judges scoring a "leap" as distinct from a "jump" based on which leg leads the takeoff, a precision irrelevant to everyday conversational use of the word.
Across the tense system
The fixed idiom "leap of faith," almost always used as a noun phrase rather than in a full verb conjugation, describes a decision made without complete certainty or proof — one of the more common figurative uses of "leap" that rarely appears in its literal past-tense verb form at all, since the idiom typically functions as a standalone noun phrase rather than part of a sentence describing an actual jump.
Common real mistakes
As with "lean," the main issue is inconsistency rather than outright error — drifting between "leaped" and "leapt" in the same document instead of committing to one dialect throughout. A separate, genuine mistake among learners is treating "leap" and "jump" as fully interchangeable in every context, when "leap" carries a slightly more dramatic, longer-distance connotation in formal writing (leap across a chasm) while "jump" is the more neutral, general-purpose verb for everyday vertical movement. A final niche note: dancers and figure skaters use "leap" as precise technical vocabulary for specific named jumps, each with its own strict form and judged criteria.
Examples
- She leaped over the fallen branch without slowing down.
- He has leaped at every opportunity so far. (American English)
- He has leapt at every opportunity so far. (British English)
- They leaped for joy when they heard the news.
- We had leaped to conclusions before hearing the full story.
- Prices leap every holiday season.
- Look before you leap.
- She's leaping into a new career this year.
Memory trick
File "leap/leapt" alongside "lean/leant" and "dream/dreamt" as the same small British-preference family, and remember "leap year" describes a date jumping forward on the calendar, not a person physically jumping — a genuinely separate, more abstract use of the same underlying idea of a sudden jump.