Past Tense of “spit”
The past tense of spit is spat; the past participle is spat.
Why “spit” behaves this way
"Spit" descends from Old English "spittan," a verb closely related by sound imitation (onomatopoeia) to the actual noise of expelling saliva, and it sits alongside a second, historically separate Old English verb "spætan," which also meant to spit and eventually merged into the same modern paradigm. This dual ancestry is part of why English ended up with two competing past forms, "spat" and "spit," rather than a single, clean line of descent the way most irregular verbs on this list have.
American English has increasingly favored "spit" as the simple past as well as the base form, treating it as a zero-change verb like "cut" or "hit," while British English much more strongly retains "spat" as the standard past tense in both speech and writing. Some American dictionaries now list both "spit" and "spat" as acceptable pasts without a strong preference, reflecting a genuine ongoing shift in progress rather than a settled rule, unusual among the more stable irregular patterns covered on this site. This kind of active, still-unsettled variation is relatively rare among English's core irregular verbs, most of which stabilized centuries ago; "spit" is a useful reminder that a handful of irregular conjugations are still genuinely in motion today rather than fixed relics of Old English grammar.
The common confusion
Because both "spat" and "spit" appear in respected dictionaries as valid simple-past forms, writers sometimes assume one must be wrong, when in fact this is a live regional and stylistic variation similar to "sneaked"/"snuck," just less widely known. A separate confusion involves the completely unrelated noun "spat" (a minor quarrel, as in "they had a spat over dinner"), spelled and pronounced identically to the past-tense verb form but with no etymological connection.
How it's actually used
"Spit" also extends figuratively to weather ("it's spitting rain," describing light, scattered rainfall) and to intense verbal delivery ("she spat out the words in anger"), both of which carry a vivid, almost aggressive physicality borrowed from the literal act of spitting, giving the verb far more expressive punch in descriptive writing than a neutral synonym like "said" or "rained" would. It also appears in the idiom "spitting image" (a striking resemblance, as in "he's the spitting image of his father"), a phrase whose exact origin is debated among etymologists but is widely believed to derive from an older expression involving being so alike as to have been "spit" from the same mold.
Across the tense system
In the perfect tense, British writers overwhelmingly favor "has spat" ("he has spat on the ground before matches as a superstition"), while American writers increasingly accept "has spit" as equally natural, meaning this is one of the few entries on this list where the correct choice for the perfect tense genuinely depends on which English-speaking audience the writer is addressing. The passive voice, by contrast, almost always uses "spat" regardless of dialect in more formal or scientific writing describing volcanic or mechanical ejection ("ash was spat from the crater"), a register where the older, more traditional form still dominates even in American publications.
Common real mistakes
The main practical issue isn't really an error so much as inconsistency — mixing "spat" and "spit" as the past tense within the same document without any stylistic reason to do so. A second, genuine error is confusing the past-tense verb "spat" with the noun "spat" (a quarrel) in a sentence where context doesn't immediately disambiguate, occasionally producing an awkwardly parsed sentence until the reader reaches a clarifying word further along. A third error, seen in translated or dubbed film subtitles, is rendering the past participle inconsistently within a single script, using "has spit" in one scene and "has spat" in another purely because different translators worked on different sections without coordinating their house style.
Examples
- He spat on the ground before stepping into the ring.
- She spit out the sour candy immediately.
- The volcano had spat ash for three days straight before falling silent.
- He spat out an angry retort before storming off.
- It was spitting rain as they left the stadium.
- The cat spat and hissed at the stranger.
Memory trick
Think of "spat" as the traditional, worldwide-safe choice — it works in both American and British writing — while "spit" as a past tense is the newer, distinctly American shortcut treating the verb like "cut" or "hit." When unsure, "spat" is the form least likely to raise an eyebrow anywhere, whether you're writing for a British or American reader.