The Past Tense of Grow: Grew, Grown, and the Blow, Know, Throw, Fly Family

You're doing dictation practice on a passage telling a childhood story. The speaker lets out "I grew up just outside Hue," you write down "I group just outside Hue," and the red underline lands right on the second word. Quick answer first: the simple past of grow is grew, and the past participle of grow is grown. The V-ing form is growing, the third person singular is grows.

The hard part about grow sits in two places. First, grew rhymes with threw, blew, knew, flew, drew, and all five words differ only in the initial consonant cluster, which is exactly the part most likely to get swallowed in fast speech. Second, grown is a perfect homophone of groan, a completely different word in meaning, so a mistranscription here gives you no warning at all.

This article runs through all of that: the form table for grow and the whole know, throw, fly family that goes with it, how grow up differs from grow and why "my parents grew me up" is a wrong sentence, plus the part that matters most for listening practice — how grew and grown actually sound when a native speaker talks at normal speed.

• The form table for grow, and the blow, know, throw family
• Grew tells the story, grown follows have, grow up is a different matter
• Hearing grew and grown in real speech
• Phrasal verbs with grew and grown
• Mistakes Vietnamese learners often make with grow
• Quick exercise
• Frequently asked questions

The form table for grow, and the blow, know, throw family

Five forms, fit into one table. The pronunciation column follows American speech, with British differences noted where they're clearly different.

The three main forms follow a very tight pattern: V1 has the diphthong /oʊ/, V2 switches entirely to /uː/, then V3 comes back to exactly the vowel of V1 and adds the letter n. This is one of the most regular irregular groups in English, and grow has a whole family that follows the same pattern.

The first four rows match down to the letter: drop -ow, add -ew for the past tense, add -own for the participle. fly veers off at V1 because it's spelled with a y, but from V2 onward it falls right back into line. draw veers off at V3 because it becomes drawn, not drown, and this is worth remembering carefully: drown is a completely different verb, meaning to die in water, and it's regular — drowned.

There's one verb that's halfway out of this group: show. Its simple past isn't shew but showed — it has shifted to being regular. But the participle still keeps both forms, shown and showed, with shown being far more common. If you want to see an irregular verb turning into a regular one right before your eyes, show is the clearest example.

A few verbs in this same family also have their own listening traps and are worth looking at together: the past tense of know has a silent k at the start so knew is a perfect homophone of new, the past tense of throw is hard because of the /θr/ cluster, which Vietnamese doesn't have, and the past tense of fly has flew as a homophone of flu, the name of an illness you run into constantly in the news. If you're reviewing the whole system, the English grammar article sorts the tenses and verb groups into their proper places.

Grew tells the story, grown follows have, grow up is a different matter

The simplest rule: grew can be the main verb of a sentence by itself, grown never stands alone. grown always needs have, has, had in front of it, or a form of be if the sentence is passive.

The part that actually trips up Vietnamese speakers the most isn't grew versus grown — it's the fact that grow carries three different meanings, and each meaning takes its own sentence pattern. Vietnamese uses three separate phrases — "lớn lên," "trồng," "nuôi lớn" — while English folds the first two into grow and pushes the third one off onto a completely different verb. The six lines below spell out the gap.

One straightforward way to remember it: grow takes plants and numbers as its object, not people. You grow rice, grow a beard, grow the business, but you raise a child or bring up a child. That line is very firm, and native speakers notice right away when it's crossed.

So when do you choose grew over have grown? It's still the time-marker rule. A sentence with last year, in 2019, when I was ten uses grew. A sentence about a change that started in the past and still holds true now uses have grown: "The city has grown a lot since I left." With the past perfect, grown keeps its role as a participle: "By the time she came back, the tree had grown past the roof."

Hearing grew and grown in real speech

This is the part that no conjugation table teaches, and with grow the listening traps are about as quiet as they come: the sentence you mishear is often still a grammatically correct English sentence, so nothing sounds an alarm.

grown and groan are absolute homophones. Both are /ɡroʊn/, with no difference whatsoever, even spoken slowly. "He has grown" and "he has groaned" can still be told apart thanks to the -ed ending, but "a grown man" and "a groan, man" can only be rescued by context. This is a pair you have to learn by meaning, not by ear.

grew, threw, blew, knew, flew, drew all rhyme. All six words end in /uː/ and differ only in the initial consonant cluster. In fast speech, the initial consonant cluster is the part under the most pressure, so "the wind blew" and "the numbers grew" can come out sounding nearly alike if you don't catch those first two sounds.

The /ɡr/ cluster doesn't exist in Vietnamese, so the ear tends to drop the r. Vietnamese doesn't combine g and r within the same syllable, so when you hear grew, your ear tends to hear it as "gu" or slip an extra vowel in the middle. This is why grew often gets transcribed as goo, glue, or group.

When grew comes before a consonant, it nearly dissolves into the following word. "grew back" comes out as "gru-back," "grew fast" comes out as "gru-fast." Because grew ends in a vowel, it has no final consonant to hold onto, and that's why it gets swallowed far more easily than grown.

have and has before grown are nearly invisible. "They have grown" in real life is "they've grown," where the 've is reduced to just a /v/ sound stuck onto the subject before crashing straight into the /ɡ/ that follows. Miss that part and you write down "they grown" — a grammatically wrong sentence that your ear finds perfectly reasonable.

grown up sticks together into one block. The final n of grown links straight into the vowel of up, so the pair comes out as "grow-nup". Learners cut it in the wrong place and write it down as "grow nup" or "gro nap". Same mechanism, growing drops its -ing tail into -in and comes out as "growin".

The table below shows you the real sentence, how it sounds when spoken fast, and the mistake learners commonly write down. The middle column is for what the ear catches, not for standard phonetic transcription.

Look at the third column and you'll see the mistakes fall into three types. group instead of grew up is a mistake of cutting the word boundary wrong when two sounds link together. drew instead of grew is a mistake with the initial consonant cluster, the part squeezed hardest in a fast sentence. groan instead of grown is a mistake you can't fix by ear alone, because the two words are pronounced exactly the same — only meaning can tell them apart.

When you do dictation practice on WELE, this error-correction chain stops being theory. Listen, then write down exactly what you hear, and the score will point precisely at the word that's off. When the word marked wrong is grew and you wrote drew, you get a very narrow, immediately usable piece of information: your ear caught the long vowel at the end correctly, it only slipped on the first two sounds. You listen to that same sentence again, and this time you only need to focus on one spot.

With grow, this way of learning solves something that reading a table can't. The group grow, blow, know, throw, fly, draw gets memorized fast — everyone reads the table once and remembers it. But precisely because the whole group rhymes, when you're listening, knowing the table by heart doesn't help at all: you know for certain the word ends in /uː/, you just don't know what it starts with. The skill you need to train here is catching the first two sounds, and it only improves once you write it down wrong and then listen again at exactly the spot you got wrong.

If you want to understand why these consonant clusters get squeezed thin — and it's not that your listening is bad — the article on connected speech explains the mechanism of sound-swallowing and linking across a whole sentence. The real sentences are taken from the podcast library, and every episode has a transcript for the comparison step.

Phrasal verbs with grew and grown

grow has given rise to a modest but heavily used set of phrasal verbs in conversation, and most of them are about people, not about plants. The thirteen lines below are written ready-made in the past or participle form.

There's a detail worth noting in the two lines grow out of and grow into. They form a symmetrical pair that learners often reverse. grow into means growing until it fits: a child grows into a shirt that's a bit too big, an employee grows into a new position. grow out of means growing too big and no longer fitting: an old shirt, or a childish habit. Same image of a shirt, two opposite directions.

The second detail sits in the hyphen. grown up written as two separate words is a verb: "She has grown up." grown-up written with a hyphen is a noun or adjective: "Two grown-ups and one child." In formal writing, this hyphen is checked very closely, and dropping it is a mistake that costs points.

Mistakes Vietnamese learners commonly make with grow

growed. The root of this mistake is the habit of treating -ed as a universal past-tense switch. grow belongs to the group blow, know, throw and never conjugates by the regular rule. There's only grew and grown, no growed, no grewed.

Did the numbers grew. Each sentence carries only one past-tense marker — here did carries it, and the verb after did stays in the base form. "Did the numbers grow?" is the correct one. This mistake shows up exactly at the moment you're focused on remembering that the past of grow is grew.

I have grew. This sentence is non-standard, and you'll still hear it from native speakers in everyday speech, just like "I have went". Hearing it out in the world isn't enough to make it a usable sentence. In an exam, in a work email, in any piece of writing, after have it must be grown.

My parents grew me up. This is a mistake typical of Vietnamese learners, translated straight from "bố mẹ nuôi tôi lớn". grow up doesn't take a person as its object. The correct sentence is "My parents brought me up" or "My parents raised me". In the same category of mistake there's also "I was grown up in Hanoi" — the correct sentence is "I grew up in Hanoi" because grow up has no passive form.

Writing grown when you meant groan, or the other way around. These two words are pronounced exactly the same but have nothing to do with each other: grown is the participle of grow, while groan means to moan. "The crowd groaned" is the crowd letting out a disappointed moan, "The crowd has grown" is the crowd getting bigger. In dictation practice, this is a spot you have to decide by the meaning of the whole sentence.

Using grow up for an adult's age. "My father is growing up" is semantically wrong: grow up only applies to the process from child to adult. For an adult, it's grow old or get older. "My father is growing old" is the sentence you meant to say.

Quick exercise

Eight sentences, fill in grow, grew, grown, growing or raised. The answers are at the end, for when you've finished the whole exercise.

1. She ______ up in a village outside Da Lat.
2. The company has ______ from four people to forty.
3. Did your hair ______ back after the treatment?
4. My grandparents ______ me while my mother worked abroad.
5. By the time we returned, the tree had ______ past the roof.
6. The waiting list is ______ every week.
7. He ______ tired of the commute and moved closer.
8. Two ______ ups and three children were in the car.

Answers: 1. grew. 2. grown. 3. grow. 4. raised. 5. grown. 6. growing. 7. grew. 8. grown.

You should take a close look at sentences 3 and 4. Sentence 3 has did in front, so the verb goes back to the base form, and learners often fill in grew right at the moment they've just remembered that the past of grow is grew. Sentence 4 has a person as the object, and grow doesn't take a person, so only raised or brought up fit. If you got these two wrong, the second part of the article is worth reading again.

Frequently asked questions

What is the past tense of grow?

The simple past of grow is grew, the past participle is grown. The two forms aren't interchangeable: grew stands alone as the main verb in a simple past sentence, while grown always follows have, has, had, or a form of be.

Grew or grown, which one to use?

Check whether there's an auxiliary verb in front of it. If there's have, has, had, use grown. If there's nothing in front, use grew. "The city grew fast" is correct, "The city has grown fast" is correct, "The city has grew fast" is wrong, "The city grown fast" is wrong.

Grow up and bring up — what's the difference?

grow up means to grow up on your own, the main subject is the person who is growing: "I grew up in Hue." bring up and raise mean to raise someone, the subject is the parent or caregiver: "My parents raised me in Hue." grow up never takes a person as its object, so "grew me up" is always wrong.

Is growed a form of grow?

No. grow is an irregular verb in the same group as blow, know, throw, fly. There is no growed in standard English, in any context, and on tests it's always the wrong answer.

Why do people mishear grew and write drew or threw instead?

Because the whole group rhymes: grew, drew, threw, blew, knew, flew all end in exactly the same long vowel sound. The only thing that tells them apart is the initial consonant cluster, and that's exactly the part that gets squeezed thinnest in fast speech. The fix is to train your ear to catch the first two sounds of the word, not to drill the chart from memory.

How long does it take to learn grew and grown well enough to catch them in fast speech?

The rules you can grasp in ten minutes, since the whole group follows one pattern. Your ear takes longer, because knowing the chart by heart doesn't help when six words rhyme. The most realistic way to measure it is to transcribe a few passages of dialogue and see where you still fall short, and the listening level test gives you a benchmark to compare against after a few weeks.

The group grow, blow, know, throw is among the easiest to remember in the irregular verb chart, and that's exactly what makes learners careless. When listening, that shared rhyme becomes a liability: you hear the end of the word correctly and still transcribe the whole word wrong. Pick a short clip and try dictation practice on a passage containing grew or grown, then see how many of the initial consonant clusters you actually catch.