Passed, Past
Passed and past are fairly commonly confused because they sound alike when spoken aloud. The key to using passed and past correctly is to grasp what they mean and to understand the different grammatical roles they play.
Passed is one of the forms of the regular verb to pass. You can tell from its -ed ending that it’s the verb form (called the past tense) that we use to describe things that have happened. Passed is also the past participle of to pass, so it’s used to form the passive voice (the law was passed in 2010) and perfect tenses (ten years have passed since I visited Paris). The main meanings of to pass are:
Past While passed is only a verb form, past is very versatile: it can function as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a preposition. Here are the main meanings for each:
But the words are occasionally confused, especially where past is an adjective. For example, this writer uses passed where past might work better:
These are more conventional:
(Description from Vocabulary.com and Oxford Dictionaries) |