Past Tense of “string”
The past tense of string is strung; the past participle is strung.
Why “string” behaves this way
"String" comes from Old English "streng," originally the noun for a cord or line, with the verb sense (to thread onto a cord, or to fit a cord onto an instrument) developing later by conversion from the noun. Once it became a verb, it was absorbed into the same "-ing/-ung" ablaut family as "sling" and "sting," landing on the same collapsed two-form pattern, "strung" doing duty for both past slots, rather than the fuller three-way vowel split seen in "sing/sang/sung."
The verb's core sense — attaching something via a cord or thread — extends today into a wide family of specialized meanings: stringing a guitar, stringing beads, stringing someone along (deceiving them over time), and being "strung out" (a slang term originally describing withdrawal from drug addiction, now used more broadly for extreme exhaustion or stress), all of which share the identical irregular conjugation despite their very different registers. Computer science later borrowed the noun "string" for a sequence of characters, a twentieth-century technical coinage that extends the same underlying image of items connected in a line, though this specialized noun sense doesn't itself take any verb conjugation.
The common confusion
The main confusion for learners is producing "stringed" by reasonable analogy with regular verbs, especially since the adjective "stringed" does legitimately exist in a completely different grammatical role — "stringed instrument" is standard musical terminology, an adjective built directly from the noun "string" rather than a verb form, which creates a confusing false pattern for anyone assuming the verb must work the same way. A second point of confusion involves distinguishing "strung" from the unrelated "stung," two words differing by a single vowel that sound almost identical in fast, casual speech.
How it's actually used
"Strung out," "strung along," and "highly strung" (British English for tense or nervous, called "high-strung" in American English) are all common idiomatic extensions that keep the identical irregular conjugation as the literal sense of threading something onto a cord, even though none of them have anything literally to do with strings or cords anymore. The financial term "string of losses" or "string of victories" extends the same underlying image of items connected in sequence, like beads on a cord, into a purely abstract description of a pattern over time. Musicians also use "the strings" collectively as shorthand for the string section of an orchestra, a nominal use built directly on the instrument-stringing sense without carrying any of the idiomatic figurative baggage of "strung along" or "strung out."
Across the tense system
The literal sense favors the passive just as strongly — "the guitar was strung with new strings before the show," "lights were strung along the entire block" — while the idiomatic senses (strung along, strung out) function more like adjectival descriptions of a state than genuine passive actions performed at a specific moment. The perfect tense with "has strung together" also appears in a productive figurative use describing connecting a series of ideas, words, or events — "she has strung together an impressive string of victories" — treating an abstract sequence exactly like beads threaded onto a cord.
Common real mistakes
The most common error is "stringed" used as a verb form ("she stringed the beads together" instead of the correct "strung"), a mistake made more likely by the coincidental existence of "stringed" as a legitimate adjective in an entirely different grammatical role. A second, much rarer error is confusing "strung" with "sprung" in fast speech, two unrelated verbs that happen to share a vowel and a hard consonant cluster. A third error, seen in music instruction writing, is using "strung" imprecisely to describe tuning rather than the physical act of installing strings, producing a slightly muddled sentence like "the guitar was strung too high," which a reader might momentarily misread as being about pitch rather than string installation.
Examples
- He strung the guitar with a fresh set of steel strings.
- They had strung lights along the entire fence before the party.
- She felt strung out after three consecutive overnight shifts.
- He strung her along for months before admitting the truth.
- The beads were strung onto a thin silver wire.
- Colorful lanterns were strung across the courtyard for the festival.
Memory trick
Group it with its rhyming cousins "sting/stung" and "sling/slung": all three merge into a single "u"-vowel form for both past tenses. Just watch out for "stringed instrument," a legitimate but unrelated adjective that has nothing to do with the verb's own conjugation in a sentence.