Verb forms
Base form
/kɑːst/
Past Simple
Past Participle
Example sentences
Base form · cast
- Fishermen cast their nets at dawn.
Past Simple · cast
- The director cast an unknown actor in the lead role.
- She cast without any hesitation.
- They cast it again the following morning.
- He didn't cast anything at the meeting.
Past Participle · cast
- The votes have all been cast.
- By the time we arrived, they had cast everything.
- We have never cast anything quite like it.
- He has cast it many times before.
Key tenses
| Present Simple | Past Simple | Present Perfect |
|---|---|---|
I cast he / she / it casts | I cast | I have cast |
| Present Continuous:I am casting · he / she / it is casting | ||
Grammar guide
The verb "cast" belongs to the AAA group — all three principal parts are identical: "cast" / "cast" / "cast". The spelling never changes, whether you use it in the present tense, past simple, or as a past participle in a perfect or passive construction.
Use "cast" in the present to describe habits, facts, or scheduled events: "We cast the figures every quarter." The same form serves as the past simple for completed actions: "They cast the budget before noon." With auxiliary verbs it functions as the past participle: "She has already cast her quota." Because all three forms look the same, an auxiliary (have, has, had) or a past-time marker (yesterday, last year) provides the tense signal.
AAA verbs are mostly short, high-frequency words ending in -t or -d, such as cost, cut, hit, hurt, let, put, set, and spread. Because they never inflect, you only need to learn one spelling. The difficulty is that context — an auxiliary verb, a time adverb, or the surrounding narrative — must indicate which tense is intended.
Quick-reference rule: when "cast" follows have, has, or had, it is acting as a past participle ("she has cast the price twice"); when it follows did not or appears in a question with did, it is the infinitive in a past-tense structure ("did they cast it correctly?"); in all other uses it is most likely present simple or a base-form infinitive.
Quick quiz
Which sentence is correct?
Conjugation pattern
All three forms are identical — nothing to memorise beyond the base form.
Verbs with the same pattern