Past Tense of “rid”
The past tense of rid is rid; the past participle is rid.
Why “rid” behaves this way
"Rid," meaning to free or clear something of an unwanted presence, comes from Old Norse "rythja" (to clear land), entering English through Norse contact during the Viking Age. Like several other short, ancient verbs, it has always been a zero-change verb across all three principal parts (rid/rid/rid), one of the more compact members of this pattern alongside "cut," "hit," and "set." Pest-control industry advertising leans heavily on the fixed phrase "rid your home of" as a standard promotional formula, one of the most commercially visible uses of this otherwise fairly understated verb.
"Rid" almost always appears today in the fixed reflexive-adjacent construction "get rid of" or the more formal "rid oneself of," rather than as a plain standalone transitive verb — this heavy reliance on set phrases is part of why many speakers rarely stop to think about "rid"'s past-tense form at all, since the fixed phrase "got rid of" relies on "got," not on a conjugated form of "rid" itself. Environmental and conservation writing uses "rid" formally in describing efforts to remove invasive species from an ecosystem ("ridding the island of invasive rats"), a precise, slightly elevated register distinct from the everyday "get rid of."
The common confusion
The confusion is less about the verb form (which never changes) and more about the fixed phrase structure: some writers mistakenly try to conjugate "rid" alone where the idiom actually requires "get rid of" or "rid oneself of," producing awkward constructions like "I rid the mice" instead of the far more natural "I got rid of the mice" or the more formal "I rid the house of mice."
How it's actually used
"Rid" is used both in the common idiom "get rid of" (informal, everyday) and in the more formal, literary construction "rid [something] of [something]" ("rid the town of crime," "rid the garden of weeds"), with the formal construction reading as noticeably more elevated or old-fashioned than the everyday idiom. Public-health campaigns sometimes use "rid" in slogans aimed at eliminating a disease or condition ("working to rid the region of malaria"), leaning on the word's formal weight for public messaging. Home organization and decluttering guides frequently use "rid" in titles and chapter headings ("ridding your home of clutter"), favoring its slightly more formal tone over the plainer "get rid of." A single afternoon is rarely enough to rid a garden of weeds that have taken hold over a full season.
Across the tense system
Because "rid" never changes form, "has rid," "was rid," and the plain past "rid" all share the same spelling — context and the surrounding sentence structure (usually "of" plus a noun) tell readers this is the past tense rather than the base form. Public-health messaging about disease elimination typically favors the ongoing progressive ("working to rid the region of") over a completed past tense, since such campaigns are usually described as still in progress rather than finished.
Common real mistakes
The occasional "ridded" does turn up in older or more formal writing, but it now reads as distinctly archaic or awkward to most modern readers; contemporary usage overwhelmingly sticks with plain "rid" for both tenses. A further point: "rid" should not be confused with "ride," an unrelated verb with an entirely different irregular conjugation despite superficial spelling similarity.
Examples
- The exterminator rid the house of termites within a week.
- She finally got rid of the old couch that had been in the garage for years.
- They rid the trail of invasive plants over several volunteer weekends.
- He has rid himself of nearly every unnecessary possession this year.
- Conservationists worked for a decade to rid the island of invasive predators.
- The new filter rid the pool of algae within just two days.
- The book's second chapter focused entirely on ridding a closet of unworn clothes.
Memory trick
This one never bothers changing shape at all — rid, rid, rid — so the thing actually worth memorizing is its favorite travel companion: the word "of," almost always trailing behind it, as in "rid of" or the everyday idiom "get rid of."