Spanish Past Participles

Overview

A regular Past Participle is a verb form that is usually used with Perfect Tenses. In English, the Past Participle is formed by either adding “-ed” or “-en” to the infinitive form, for example, the Past Participle of the verb “to walk” is “walked”. More times than not, however, this just looks like the Simple Past Tense. In order to form the past participle in Spanish, all you have to do is drop the ending (-ar, -er or -ir) from the Infinitive Verb and then add either -ado (if the ending of the verb was -ar) or -ido (if the ending of the verb was either -er or -ir).

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A past participle is a very useful verb form that can be used as an adjective or as part of a perfect tense when is used in conjunction with the verb “Haber”

Regular Past Participle Spanish forms:

To form the past participle of a verb, you drop the infinitive ending (ar-er-ir) and add “ado” to the stem of “ar” verbs, and “ido,” to verbs ending in “er-ir.” This is the equivalent of adding “ed,” to many verbs in English.

How to form past participle form with regular verbs:

ar- verb - hablar - habl - hablado

er -verb - Tener - Ten – Tenido

Many verbs that are irregular have past participles, and on the table below are a few of them:

Infinitive Past Participle English

abrir	abierto	opened
decir	dicho	said
escribir	escrito	written
hacer	hecho	done
ver	visto	seen

There are quite a few perfect tenses in Spanish and they all use past participles.

Haber + past participle

These examples show the past participle being used in the present perfect and the future perfect: H H ¿

¿Has viajado mucho a Madrid?

Have you traveled a lot to Madrid?

Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in Spanish. When this is the case, they must agree in number and gender to the nouns they modify.

Me encantan los huevos revueltos

I love scramble eggs.

Past Participles in Spanish

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