Past Tense of “sting”
The past tense of sting is stung; the past participle is stung.
Why “sting” behaves this way
"Sting" comes from Old English "stingan," another member of the Class III nasal-consonant strong-verb group — related to "sing/sang/sung" through that shared ablaut ancestry — though "sting," like "cling" and "sling" beside it, merged its past simple and participle early into the single form "stung" rather than preserving the fuller three-way split "sing" and "ring" kept.
The verb's original sense was specifically about piercing with a sharp point, a meaning still visible in the literal insect-sting sense today, and it extended figuratively fairly early to describe emotional pain ("the criticism stung") and, later, to twentieth-century American criminal-justice slang for an undercover law-enforcement operation designed to catch a criminal in the act — a "sting operation," now standard vocabulary in journalism and law enforcement worldwide. This particular figurative leap, from literal insect pain to undercover police work, is thought to have developed through an intermediate underworld slang sense of "to sting" meaning to swindle or cheat someone out of money, a meaning still occasionally heard today in phrases like "he got stung for fifty dollars."
The common confusion
The main confusion for learners is producing the overregularized "stinged," especially since "sting" resembles many verbs that do take "-ed" and gives no obvious spelling cue toward its irregular status. A separate, more specialized confusion involves distinguishing the passive literal sense ("she was stung by a bee") from the figurative sense ("he was stung by the accusation"), both of which use the identical passive construction but describe entirely different kinds of pain. A third, more niche confusion arises in poker and card-game slang, where "stung" occasionally describes losing a hand badly, an informal, subculture-specific extension that some readers unfamiliar with the game might mistake for either the insect or the crime-related sense.
How it's actually used
"Sting" as a noun for the undercover law-enforcement operation has become so common in crime journalism that many readers now associate the word first with that meaning rather than with the literal insect bite, an interesting case of a figurative, specialized sense partially overtaking a verb's original literal meaning in everyday recognition. It also functions as a noun for a musical flourish marking a dramatic moment ("a sting played as the villain appeared"), a specialized use in television and film production borrowed from the same underlying sense of a sharp, sudden impact. In everyday emotional description, "sting" appears constantly with abstract nouns like pride, disappointment, and betrayal, allowing writers to convey sharp, sudden emotional pain far more vividly than a flatter verb like "hurt" would manage.
Across the tense system
The passive voice dominates both the literal and figurative senses — "she was stung twice on the same afternoon," "he was stung by the remark" — since in both cases the grammatical focus naturally falls on the person affected rather than on the bee or the person who made the hurtful comment. The specialized crime-related sense also favors the passive in news writing — "the suspect was stung by an undercover officer" — reinforcing the same pattern of foregrounding the person acted upon rather than the officer conducting the operation.
Common real mistakes
The most common error is "stinged," an overregularization occasionally seen in casual writing, particularly from writers translating from languages where the equivalent verb is regular. A second, much rarer error is confusing "sting" with the noun "sting" in the crime-related sense when the literal insect sense is intended, producing brief reader confusion in a sentence like "the sting left a mark," which could describe either an insect bite or the aftermath of a police operation without more context. A third error, seen in casual sports commentary, is overusing the figurative "stung" for any kind of loss or setback regardless of severity, diluting the word's original vividness through overuse in headlines like "Team Stung Again," applied equally to a narrow loss and a historic upset.
Examples
- A wasp stung him on the hand at the picnic.
- The criticism stung more than she expected.
- Police have stung dozens of scammers with this same tactic.
- The salt water stung the fresh cut on her knee.
- His pride was stung by the harsh review.
- The remark stung, even though he tried not to show it.
Memory trick
It rhymes with "clung" and "slung," and it borrows their exact trick: swap the vowel to "u" and let one word do double duty for both past-tense slots. That single form covers a bee sting, a harsh remark, and an undercover police operation alike.