Past Tense of “sling”
The past tense of sling is slung; the past participle is slung.
Why “sling” behaves this way
"Sling" traces to Old Norse "slyngva" and Middle Low German "slingen," borrowed into English during the heavy Scandinavian contact of the medieval period and absorbed straight into the native strong-verb system rather than staying regular the way many later borrowings did. It joined the same "-ing/-ung" ablaut family as "sing/sang/sung" and "ring/rang/rung," taking the "u" vowel for both its past simple and participle rather than developing a separate three-vowel pattern.
Unlike "sing" and "ring," which preserve a distinct past-simple vowel ("sang," "rang") separate from the participle ("sung," "rung"), "sling" merged its past simple and participle into the single form "slung" fairly early, following the same collapsing tendency seen in "cling/clung" and "fling/flung" — a small sub-family of "-ing" verbs that never developed the three-way split their older relatives kept. The noun "sling," meaning either a weapon for hurling stones (as in the biblical David and Goliath story) or a supportive strap for an injured arm, entered English from the same Germanic root, and both senses have existed side by side in English since the Old English period, long before the modern casual sense of "sling" (to toss or hurl something quickly) became common.
The common confusion
Writers sometimes confuse "slung" with "slinged," reasoning by analogy from far more common regular verbs, or mix it up with the unrelated noun "sling" (an arm support or a weapon) — the verb and the noun are historically connected but function completely independently in a sentence, so "her arm was slung" only works if you mean it was physically thrown, not that it was placed in a supportive sling. A related confusion arises with the fixed idiom "sling hash," American slang for working as a short-order cook, which some writers mistakenly assume must be a typo for "fling hash" simply because "sling" feels like the less familiar of the two verbs in casual reading.
How it's actually used
In modern usage "sling" appears constantly in casual, punchy prose — "sling insults," "sling mud," "sling a bag over one's shoulder" — where its short, hard-consonant sound fits the register of quick, forceful action better than a smoother synonym like "throw" would. This stylistic niche is part of why the verb has stayed common in informal writing and dialogue despite being relatively rare in formal registers. It also appears as a specialized technical verb in construction and rigging ("sling the load before the crane lifts it"), a register where precision matters and "slung" describes a specific, secured attachment method rather than a casual toss.
Across the tense system
Because "slung" serves as both past simple and participle, perfect-tense sentences never require a separate memorized form: "they have slung mud at each other for years" uses the identical word as "they slung the packs onto the truck." This mirrors the same one-form economy found in "sting/stung/stung" and "sling"'s close relative "cling/clung/clung." The passive voice is common with this verb in its rigging and carrying senses — "the load was slung beneath the helicopter" — where the passive foregrounds the object being carried rather than the person doing the carrying, a natural fit for technical and journalistic writing.
Common real mistakes
The clearest real-world error is "slinged," most often seen in casual online writing where a less common irregular verb gets regularized by a writer unfamiliar with its correct form. A second error is treating "sling" as unchanging like "put" or "cut," producing an incorrect "he sling the bag over his shoulder yesterday" instead of the correct "slung." A third error, seen mostly in speech-to-text transcription, renders "slung" as the unrelated word "slunk" because the two share a vowel sound and a hard final consonant, even though "sling/slung" and "slink/slunk" are completely separate verbs with different meanings.
Examples
- He slung his backpack over one shoulder and left.
- The two politicians have slung accusations at each other all week.
- She slung the wet towel onto the railing.
- They had slung ropes across the ravine before the storm hit.
- The waiter slung plates onto the table without ceremony.
- Mud was slung in both directions during the debate.
Memory trick
Group it with its rhyming cousins "cling/clung" and "fling/flung": all three swap "i" for "u" and never bother with a separate participle form. If you know "flung," you already know "slung" by the same rule, and that same trick works for a whole small family of "-ing" verbs at once.