Past Tense of “spring”
The past tense of spring is sprang; the past participle is sprung.
Why “spring” behaves this way
"Spring" comes from Old English "springan." Grammatically it's a Class III strong verb, and it kept the fullest surviving form of that group's ablaut: the same i/a/u vowel ladder visible in close relatives "sing/sang/sung" and "ring/rang/rung." This is one of the largest and most productive strong-verb families to survive fully intact into Modern English, and "spring" is simply one of its most common members, alongside its literal sense of sudden, energetic upward or forward motion.
In American English, "sprung" has increasingly encroached on "sprang" as the simple past tense as well as the participle ("he sprung out of bed" instead of the traditionally correct "he sprang out of bed"), a dialectal leveling process very similar to what's happened with "drink/drank/drunk," where casual American speech increasingly collapses the three-way distinction into a simpler two-form system. British English and edited American prose still much more consistently preserve the traditional three-way split. Linguists studying this kind of change note that collapsing a three-form paradigm into two forms is actually the more common long-term trajectory for strong verbs generally, so "spring" may simply be a few decades ahead of where several of its ablaut relatives are eventually headed.
The common confusion
The genuine live question for writers today is whether "sprang" or "sprung" is correct as the simple past tense: formal, edited writing in both American and British English still specifies "sprang" ("she sprang to her feet"), while casual American speech increasingly uses "sprung" for the same slot, a change that hasn't yet been accepted by most style guides or dictionaries as fully standard, unlike the more settled "snuck"/"sneaked" situation.
How it's actually used
"Spring" also carries the specialized sense of a water source suddenly appearing or flowing ("a spring bubbled up from the rock"), and the noun "spring" for the coiled metal device and the season both derive from the same underlying concept of sudden, energetic emergence or release — a season when plants suddenly emerge, and a coil that suddenly releases stored energy, both metaphorically tied to the verb's core meaning of abrupt appearance or motion. The phrasal verb "spring on" (to surprise someone with unexpected news, as in "she sprang the news on him at dinner") is a fully productive modern extension that still follows the same traditional sprang/sprung split in careful writing.
Across the tense system
In the perfect and passive systems, only "sprung" is acceptable regardless of dialect — "the trap has sprung," "a new business had sprung up on the corner" — so the live dialectal dispute is entirely confined to the simple past slot; nobody disputes that the participle is "sprung," which somewhat limits how much confusion this verb actually causes in practice compared to how it might first appear. This clean split between a contested simple past and an uncontested participle is actually fairly unusual among English's shifting irregular verbs, most of which see variation spreading to both forms rather than staying neatly confined to just one slot in the paradigm.
Common real mistakes
The most consequential real error, at least by traditional standards, is using "sprung" as the simple past in formal writing ("the idea sprung to mind" instead of the traditionally preferred "the idea sprang to mind"), a usage increasingly common in casual and journalistic English but still flagged by many copyeditors and style guides as nonstandard. A second, much less common error is the childhood overregularization "springed," rare in adult writing. A third error, mostly seen in headline writing, is dropping the auxiliary verb entirely and using "sprung" as if it were a simple present-tense form for stylistic punch ("New Café Sprung Up Downtown"), a deliberate headline convention rather than a grammatical mistake, though it can read as jarring if carried into the body copy of the same article.
Examples
- She sprang to her feet the moment she heard the news.
- A new coffee shop has sprung up on nearly every corner downtown.
- The cat sprang from the windowsill without warning.
- The trap had already sprung before the fox reached it.
- Weeds sprang up all over the garden after the rain.
- He sprang into action as soon as the alarm sounded.
Memory trick
Pair it with its close relatives "sing/sang/sung" and "ring/rang/rung": all three keep a genuine three-way vowel split in careful writing, so if you'd never say "he singed a song" for "he sang," hold "sprang" to that same formal standard even though casual speech is increasingly blurring the line with "sprung" in everyday conversation.