Past Tense of “swing”
The past tense of swing is swung; the past participle is swung.
Why “swing” behaves this way
"Swing" comes from Old English "swingan," which originally meant "to beat," "to whip," or "to flog" rather than the gentler back-and-forth motion the word describes today — a substantial narrowing and softening of meaning over roughly a thousand years. It belongs to the same class-3 strong-verb family as "sing" and "swim," but unlike those two, it never developed three distinct forms. The German cognate 'schwingen' still covers a wider range of vibrating and oscillating motion, a sense narrowed in English to the more specific back-and-forth arc we associate with playground swings, pendulums, and swung bats.
"Swing," along with "sting," "sling," "cling," "fling," "string," and "wring," collapsed its past tense and participle into a single identical form early on, rather than keeping the three-way sang/sung-style distinction — a genuine subgroup within class 3 verbs, distinguished from the sing/ring/drink group by this two-form rather than three-form pattern.
The common confusion
Since "swung" never needs to change shape between the simple past and the participle, there's little internal tense confusion; the real error people make is inventing a nonexistent third form, "swang," by false analogy with "sang" or "rang" — an overcorrection based on the wrong subgroup of class-3 verbs. Because 'swing' functions equally well as a noun (a playground swing, a golf swing, a mood swing) and as a verb, sentences with minimal context can occasionally leave a reader briefly uncertain which part of speech is intended until later words in the sentence resolve the ambiguity.
How it's actually used
"Swing" extends into a wide range of figurative uses — "swing by" (visit briefly), "swing a deal" (arrange something, often with effort), "opinion swung" (shifted) — and every one keeps the identical swung/swung pattern of the literal sense, since, as usual, the irregularity belongs to the verb itself rather than any particular meaning. Beyond the literal pendulum motion, 'swing' names a whole genre of jazz-influenced dance music from the 1930s and 40s, and in American politics a 'swing state' is one whose vote isn't reliably fixed to either party — two entirely different domains, music and politics, that both borrowed the same image of something moving back and forth between positions. 'Swing' additionally names a specific rhetorical move in negotiation and rhetoric — to 'swing a deal' or 'swing an argument' one's way — extending the physical image of momentum shifting in a particular direction into the abstract domain of persuasion and bargaining.
Across the tense system
Since 'swung' fills both the simple-past and participle slots identically, the perfect tenses ('has swung,' 'had swung') are distinguished from the simple past ('swung') purely by the presence of the auxiliary verb, with no vowel shift at all to signal the difference the way 'sang' versus 'sung' would.
Common real mistakes
Inventing "swang" as a past tense is the most common genuine error, a false-analogy overcorrection from the neighboring sing/sang/sung pattern. A much rarer slip is regularizing to "swinged," typically only seen in early child language before the correct irregular form is fully acquired. One more real slip worth flagging: some speakers extend 'swing' informally into a noun phrase like 'give it a swing' when 'give it a try' or 'give it a shot' would be the more standard idiom, a blending of related but historically separate figures of speech.
Examples
- She swung the bat with everything she had.
- He has swung by the office twice this week.
- The pendulum swings back and forth with perfect regularity.
- They were swinging on the old tire swing all afternoon.
- Had the door swung shut on its own, no one would have noticed the draft.
- Public opinion has swung sharply in the last month.
- Let's swing past the store on the way home.
- The mood in the room is swinging toward optimism.
- Pennsylvania is often described as a key swing state in national elections.
Memory trick
Group "swing" with "sting," "sling," "cling," and "fling" — swung, stung, slung, clung, flung — a whole family that keeps one identical form for both past and participle, unlike "sing/sang/sung" next door with three separate forms. If "swang" ever tempts you, remember it belongs to a different, smaller group of verbs (sing, ring, drink) that "swing" simply doesn't share membership with.