Past Tense of “stick”
The past tense of stick is stuck; the past participle is stuck.
Why “stick” behaves this way
"Stick" descends from two closely related Old English roots that eventually merged: "stician" (to pierce or stab, related to the noun "stick" for a piece of wood, itself once a pointed implement) and a separate strong verb pattern that supplied the modern irregular past form "stuck." This merger of a historically weak verb with a strong-verb-style past tense, through analogy with similar-sounding verbs like "strike/struck," is part of why "stick" doesn't fit neatly into any single ablaut family the way more consistent strong verbs like "speak" or "steal" do.
The verb's two core modern senses — to pierce or stab (as in "stick a pin into it") and to adhere or become fixed in place (as in "the label stuck to the jar") — both trace back to the same physical image of something becoming lodged or fastened at a point, and both share the identical irregular conjugation despite feeling, in modern usage, like almost two separate verbs. The specific past form "stuck" likely spread to "stick" through analogy with "strike/struck" sometime in Middle English, since the two verbs share both a similar sound shape and a related sense of forceful contact, even though they ultimately come from separate Old English roots.
The common confusion
Learners occasionally regularize to "sticked," especially since "stick" doesn't show an obviously irregular spelling change the way many strong verbs do — it looks like it should simply add "-ed." A second, more subtle confusion is the idiom "stick to your guns," where some writers second-guess the tense, unsure whether the correct past form is "she stuck to her guns" or an invented "she sticked to her guns" — the former is correct. A third confusion involves the noun "stickup" (an armed robbery), a fixed compound noun that some readers mistakenly assume must relate grammatically to the verb's past-tense form, when it's simply a noun built on the imperative phrase "stick 'em up."
How it's actually used
"Stick" appears in an unusually large number of fixed idioms — stick around, stick out, stick up for, stick with, stick it out — nearly all built on the core notion of remaining fixed or attached in some way, whether physically or figuratively, and every one of these phrasal variants takes the identical irregular conjugation as the base verb. The noun "stick," meaning a piece of wood, is where the verb's alternate historical sense of piercing originally comes from, since an early meaning of the noun was specifically a pointed implement used for stabbing or piercing, a connection now largely invisible to modern speakers who think of a stick as simply a fallen tree branch.
Across the tense system
The passive voice appears constantly with the literal adhesive sense — "the note was stuck to the refrigerator" — while the figurative senses (stuck in traffic, stuck with the bill, stuck for an answer) more often function as adjectival descriptions of a state rather than true passive actions, a subtle grammatical distinction that native speakers navigate intuitively without necessarily being able to articulate the rule. The perfect tense also appears in the common complaint construction "I've been stuck here for hours," which describes an ongoing, unwelcome state rather than a single discrete event, distinguishing it from the simple past "I got stuck," which frames the situation as a specific occurrence with a clear beginning.
Common real mistakes
The dominant error is "sticked," an overregularization that turns up now and then among non-native writers and in unedited casual prose. A second error, much more common in idiomatic speech, is confusing "stuck" with "struck" in fast speech or transcription — two verbs sharing a vowel and a hard consonant cluster, yet tracing to unrelated roots with unrelated meanings (adhering versus hitting). A third error appears in music writing, where the specialized noun "drumstick" is occasionally, and incorrectly, treated as if it changes the base verb's conjugation, producing a nonstandard "he drumsticked the beat" instead of the correct phrasing built around a different verb, such as "he played the beat."
Examples
- The gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
- He stuck to his original plan despite the pressure.
- They were stuck in traffic for nearly two hours.
- The label had stuck so firmly it wouldn't peel off.
- She stuck up for her younger brother at school.
- The negotiations have stuck on a single disputed clause.
Memory trick
Pair it with its rhyming cousin "strike/struck": both take a vowel shift to "u" for a merged past-and-participle form, and both describe something forceful becoming fixed in place — one by hitting, the other by adhering.