Past Tense of “wear”
The past tense of wear is wore; the past participle is worn.
Why “wear” behaves this way
"Wear" traces to Old English "werian," meaning specifically "to carry on the body" or "to clothe" — related more distantly to a root meaning "to guard" or "to defend," since clothing and armor both protect the wearer. Though it began as a weak verb in Old English, it fell in with the strong class-4 pattern over time by analogy with "bear," "tear," and "swear," all of which share the identical o/o-n shape. The word survives today in the specialized retail term 'menswear' and 'outerwear,' compounds that freeze the bare verb stem as a noun describing a category of clothing rather than an action at all.
This kind of drift — a verb migrating from the weak (regular) camp into a strong pattern by analogy with similar-sounding neighbors — runs opposite to the much more common direction of change in English, where strong verbs gradually regularize. "Wear" is a reminder that the traffic occasionally flows the other way too.
The common confusion
The genuine confusion is almost entirely about "wore" versus "worn" after a helping verb: "I have wore that coat before" is a frequent nonstandard slip, since "wore" feels complete and finished on its own, while "worn" sounds slightly unusual outside a participial context. There's also a subtler distinction between 'wear' meaning to have clothing on and 'wear' meaning to display an expression or attitude, as in 'she wore a puzzled look,' a figurative extension that keeps the identical wore/worn conjugation while describing something entirely non-physical.
How it's actually used
"Wear" extends beyond clothing into a genuine range of figurative senses — "wear thin" (patience running out), "wear down" (gradually erode), "wear off" (fade in effect) — and every one of these idiomatic senses keeps the same irregular wore/worn pattern as the literal sense of wearing clothes, since the irregularity is a property of the verb form, not any one meaning. The fixed phrase 'wear and tear,' describing the gradual damage that ordinary use causes, pairs the two irregular verbs discussed elsewhere on this site side by side as nouns, and the newer coinage 'wearable' (as in wearable technology) shows the root still generating new vocabulary in entirely modern contexts. In law and insurance, the phrase 'fair wear and tear' specifically distinguishes ordinary, expected deterioration from damage caused by negligence or misuse, a genuinely consequential legal distinction that hinges on this one irregular-verb-derived compound noun.
Across the tense system
'Worn' pulls double duty as a true participle in the perfect tenses ('has worn') and as a plain adjective describing gradual damage ('worn shoes,' 'worn out'), a dual role shared by many irregular participles but especially visible with 'wear' because the adjectival sense is used constantly in everyday description.
Common real mistakes
The dominant error is pairing "wore" with a helping verb instead of "worn" ("has wore," "had wore"), a mistake common in casual speech across many English dialects. A secondary, rarer error is regularizing to "weared," typically produced by early learners generalizing the regular -ed pattern before the irregular form is fully acquired. Yet another subtlety is the difference between 'wear' as a durability verb (a fabric 'wears well' or 'wears out') and 'wear' as a simple clothing verb, both of which share the same wore/worn conjugation but describe fundamentally different kinds of events — one a single act of dressing, the other a gradual process unfolding over months or years.
Examples
- She wore a red dress to the wedding.
- He has worn that same jacket for a decade.
- The stone steps show where centuries of feet have worn a groove.
- They were wearing matching costumes.
- Had the tires worn down less, the car would have gripped the road better.
- This shirt wears well even after many washes.
- Let's wear something warm tonight.
- She's wearing her hair differently this year.
- The lease holds tenants responsible for damage beyond normal wear and tear.
Memory trick
Group "wear" with "tear" and "bear": wore/worn, tore/torn, bore/born — the shared rhyme makes all three easy to recall together. If you're tempted to write "has wore," swap in "has torn" mentally first; since nobody says "has tore," the same participle rule applies identically to "wear."