Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[iloveyou]

The past tense of the verb fight is fought according to the dictionary,
but my ears are so familiar with fighted...
so, I googled and found many sentences using fighted instead of fought...
"I fighted my brother yesterday"

So, do you say both fighted and fought?

Thanks
Yun

[dragn]

No, fighted is 100 percent wrong, substandard usage. It's fight-fought-fought. We do not say both. I don't know what kind of junk you saw on Google, but you're just going to have to trust me on this one.

Are you sure some of those Google hits weren't examples of incorrect usage? Or moronic lyrics from some pop song? Or quotes from 5-year-olds? Just curious.

You don't have to believe me. Ask every single native speaker you meet over the age of five.

Greg

[redset]

Here's a quick Google tip - Google actually searches for variations on the words you type in (alternate spellings, other conjugations/verb forms), and includes pages with any of these variations in its results. If you add a plus sign in front of a search term, it tells Google that its results have to include that exact word or phrase.

Searching for +fighted instead of fighted brings 5.5 million results down to about 76,000, and you can get that down to 58,000 by weeding out those song references that keep showing up. It's still nothing to celebrate but at least the picture isn't as grim as it first appears