Past Tense of “spill”
The past tense of spill is spilled; the past participle is spilled.
Why “spill” behaves this way
"Spill" comes from Old English "spillan," originally meaning "to destroy" or "to kill," a considerably more violent sense than its modern meaning of accidentally releasing a liquid. The narrowing from "destroy/waste" to the specific modern sense of liquid escaping a container happened gradually over Middle English, with the older, more general sense of wasting or squandering something surviving today mainly in the fixed phrase "spill blood" and in "spillage" as a general term for waste. It was already a weak, regular-pattern verb in Old English, so unlike many verbs on this list, its "-ed" past tense was never in doubt; the only real variation is the British t-preterite spelling "spilt."
"Spilled" and "spilt" form yet another member of the British t-preterite family alongside "smelled/smelt" and "spelled/spelt," with the identical regional pattern: American English strongly prefers "spilled," while British English uses both, and "spilt" is often specifically preferred in the fixed idiom "no use crying over spilt milk," where the traditional form persists in the proverb even among speakers who'd use "spilled" everywhere else in their own writing.
The common confusion
The idiom "don't cry over spilled/spilt milk" is a useful test case for how fixed expressions can preserve an older form long after everyday usage has shifted: many American speakers who otherwise always say "spilled" will still quote the proverb as "spilt milk," showing that idioms often freeze a particular historical variant independent of a speaker's regular dialect preference. A separate confusion involves the noun "spillage," a fairly modern coinage used mostly in environmental, industrial, and safety contexts ("oil spillage") that some writers mistakenly assume must be more formal or technically correct than simply writing "a spill," when in fact both are standard and the choice is purely stylistic.
How it's actually used
"Spill" extends figuratively to information and secrets — "spill the beans," "spill a secret" — a metaphorical use dating to early twentieth-century American slang, where revealing hidden information is likened to an uncontrolled liquid escaping its container, and this figurative sense takes the identical conjugation as the literal one in every register. It also appears in the more casual phrasal idiom "spill over," describing an effect or consequence extending beyond its original boundary — "the conflict spilled over into neighboring regions" — a usage now standard in political and economic writing that keeps the same regular past-tense conjugation as the literal container-and-liquid sense.
Across the tense system
Writers reach for the passive constantly with the literal sense — "the coffee was spilled all over the report" — since spills are usually described in terms of what got spilled rather than who spilled it, especially in workplace or accident-report writing where assigning blame explicitly may be avoided. The figurative senses behave a little differently: "spilled over" almost always appears in the active voice describing an effect expanding outward, while "spill the beans" almost never appears in the passive at all, since the idiom's whole rhetorical force depends on naming the person doing the revealing.
Common real mistakes
The main practical error, as with its t-preterite cousins, is inconsistent switching between "spilled" and "spilt" within one piece of writing. A second error specific to this verb is treating the idiom "spill the beans" as if it must conjugate differently from the literal sense, producing an occasional hesitant "she spilt the beans about the surprise party" from writers unsure whether the figurative idiom follows the same rules as ordinary liquid-spilling — it does. A third error, mostly seen in translated writing, is using "spilled/spilt" for the older, archaic "destroy or waste" sense in modern prose ("soldiers spilled the enemy's forces"), a usage that has been essentially obsolete outside the fixed phrase "spill blood" for well over a century and reads as strange or overly literary in ordinary contemporary writing.
Examples
- He spilled coffee all over his desk this morning.
- She had spilt the secret before anyone asked her to.
- The truck spilled its cargo across two lanes of traffic.
- They have spilled ink over this argument for years.
- No use crying over spilt milk, as the saying goes.
- The paint spilled before she could catch the can.
Memory trick
File it with its British t-preterite cousins "spelt" and "smelt": "spilled" is safe everywhere, "spilt" is the marked British form — except in the fixed proverb "spilt milk," which many American speakers quote with the old form even though they'd never otherwise use it in their own writing.