The Past Tense of Swear: Swore and Sworn, Between an Oath and a Curse

You're doing dictation practice on a short news clip. The speaker drops a line about a trial, and you write it down as "He sore to tell the truth" — then the grading underlines the second word in red. The real sentence is "He swore to tell the truth". Quick answer first: the simple past of swear is swore, and the past participle is sworn. The -ing form is swearing, the third person singular is swears.

That's as far as the easy part goes. Swear is hard in two very different places. First is meaning: the same verb is used both for an oath sworn before a court and for cursing on the street, and what decides which meaning you're hearing is the preposition that follows, not the verb itself. Second is sound: the /sw/ cluster at the start of a word doesn't exist in Vietnamese, so swore very easily collapses into sore and sworn very easily collapses into worn.

This article works through the whole chain: the form table for swear and the trio wear, tear, bear that share its pattern, where swore belongs and where sworn belongs, which preposition flips the meaning from oath to curse, how these three forms actually sound when a native speaker talks fast, and the most repeated mistakes.

• The form table for swear, and the trio wear, tear, bear sharing its pattern
• When to use swore, when to use sworn, and how the preposition decides the meaning
• Hearing swore and sworn in real speech, next to sore and worn
• Common phrases with swear, swore and sworn
• Mistakes Vietnamese learners often make with swear
• Quick exercises
• Frequently asked questions

The form table for swear, and the trio wear, tear, bear sharing its pattern

Five forms, compact in one table. The phonetic transcriptions in the table follow American pronunciation. Wherever British pronunciation differs noticeably, it's noted as well.

Swear doesn't stand alone. It belongs to a small group that conjugates along exactly one pattern: the vowel /eə/ in the base form changes to /ɔː/ in the simple past, then an -n is added for the participle. Wear becomes wore becomes worn. Tear becomes tore becomes torn. Bear becomes bore becomes borne. Swear becomes swore becomes sworn. Four verbs, one shared path, and if you know one, the other three almost come for free.

The one place this group breaks step is bear. Its participle splits into two: borne is used for the meaning of carrying or enduring, while born is reserved for being born. Swear is lucky enough not to have that problem — sworn is the only form, and it covers both meanings of the verb.

There's a spelling point worth noting about the letter combination ear. Normally ear is read /ɪər/, as in hear, near, fear, year, dear. But bear, pear, wear, swear, and tear in the sense of ripping are read /eər/ — rhyming with where, not with here. This is one of the spots where English spelling betrays you the most, and it explains why so many Vietnamese speakers pronounce swear as a sound close to "swia".

One more small detail that few sites mention: the w in swear and swore is pronounced, but the w in sword is completely silent — sword is read /sɔːrd/. If you're practicing listening for the /sw/ cluster, don't use sword as an example; it falls outside the group.

Three verbs are worth placing next to swear because they're its three siblings. The past tense of wear is wore and worn — exactly the same frame as swore and sworn but without the initial /s/ sound, so this is also a pair that gets mistaken for each other. The past tense of tear is tore and torn, same pattern, plus its own separate trap: the word tear has a completely different pronunciation when it's the noun meaning teardrop. The past tense of bear is bore and borne, same pattern but the participle splits into two forms, exactly where swear keeps a single form. For the whole system, there's the article on English grammar, where the tenses and verb groups all sit in their proper places.

When to use swore, when to use sworn, and how the preposition decides the meaning

The shortest rule: swore stands alone, sworn never stands alone. Swore is the simple past — it functions as the main verb of the sentence by itself. Sworn is a participle — it always needs have, has, or had in front of it, or a form of be in a passive sentence.

What actually causes confusion isn't swore versus sworn — it's the fact that swear carries two meanings with nothing to do with each other. One meaning is to swear, to take an oath, to make a solemn commitment. The other is to curse, to swear in the vulgar sense. Same verb, and Vietnamese splits them into two completely different words, so learners have nothing to anchor to.

What decides which meaning you're hearing is the preposition or structure that follows. The seven lines below are placed side by side so you can see it clearly.

Two lines worth memorizing are swear at and swear by. They differ by only one preposition, yet the meanings point in opposite directions: swear at somebody means to curse at that person, while swear by something means to trust it so much you'd swear on it. The sentence "My mother swore by that ointment" means my mother trusted that ointment completely — there's nothing rude in it at all.

The fourth line is also worth noting because it has no preposition marking an object at all. When swear stands alone with no object, it almost always carries the cursing meaning: "He swears a lot" means he curses a lot, not that he takes oaths a lot. To express the oath meaning without stating the content, people use "take an oath" or add to.

So when do you choose swore over have sworn? It's still the general rule of English. When there's a closed time marker, use swore: "He swore an oath in 2019". With no time marker, and you're talking about a commitment still in effect now, use has sworn: "He has sworn to keep it quiet".

Hearing swore and sworn in real speech, next to sore and worn

This is the part the conjugation table doesn't tell you, and it's also what decides whether you transcribe the word correctly. On paper, swore and sworn are clearly different from sore and worn. In speech at normal speed, what tells them apart is a glide sound lasting less than a tenth of a second.

The /sw/ cluster at the start of a word doesn't exist in Vietnamese. Vietnamese doesn't stack two consonants together at the start of a syllable, so when you encounter swear, swore, sworn, your mouth tends to drop one of them or slip a vowel in between. And a mouth that isn't used to producing something means an ear that isn't used to catching it either. This is the root of every mistake in this section.

Swore and sore differ by exactly the /w/ sound. Both start with /s/, share the same vowel /ɔː/, and form a single syllable. The /w/ in the middle is a glide — it has no noise of its own, and it gets swallowed whole when the sentence runs fast. "He swore at me" and "He sore at me" begin almost identically; it's just that the second sentence is meaningless, so you have to rely on context to fix it.

Sworn belongs to a very crowded rhyme family. Born, worn, torn, corn, horn, morn, thorn all end in the same block of sound. When the /sw/ at the front gets compressed, sworn falls straight down into worn. The phrases "he was sworn in" and "he was worn in" have the same number of syllables and the same rhythm.

In British accents the final r drops, so the gap gets even narrower. In a British accent, swore is /swɔː/ and sore is /sɔː/ — the two words differ by a single glide and there's no r to hold onto. Sworn becomes /swɔːn/, leaving just the vowel plus /n/. If you're listening to a British-accent podcast, this part is noticeably harder.

The phrase I swear becomes a filler and loses all its "swearing" meaning. In conversation, "I swear" gets wedged into the middle of a sentence just for emphasis, like seriously or I'm telling you the truth. It contracts down to one block, "ai-swer," and slides past very fast. A learner waiting to hear a solemn oath won't understand why a character telling a story about going out to eat is suddenly swearing to something.

Sworn in fuses into one block with no gap. The final n of sworn links straight into the in that follows, coming out as "sworn-nin." The whole phrase "was sworn in" rings out as "wuz sworn-nin," and the boundary between the two words disappears completely.

Three states of the same sentence sit in the table below: as written, as it sounds, and as it gets mis-transcribed. The middle column doesn't use textbook phonetic transcription — it writes down exactly what reaches the ear.

Looking down the third column, you'll see the errors fall into three different types. Rows one, two and six are lost onset sounds: the /sw/ cluster gets squeezed down so the word drops onto a different word already sitting in your head. Rows three and four are word-boundary errors: the /t/ or /b/ sound of the preposition links onto the word before it, so the ear groups the break in the wrong place, and mishearing one preposition changes the meaning of the whole sentence. Row five is a functional error: you hear the word correctly but assign it the role of a main verb, when it's actually just a filler.

On WELE, a dictation listening session shows you this chain running through step by step. After listening to a sentence you write down exactly what you hear, and then the scoring pinpoints exactly which word is off. When the flagged word is swore but you wrote sore, you get a piece of information that reading a verb conjugation table never gives you: your ear caught the vowel and the initial consonant correctly but dropped a glide in the middle. You listen to that same sentence again, and this time you already know where to focus.

You remember from the very moment you see where you transcribed something wrong. Finish reading the five-row table at the start of the article, and ten minutes later you still know that the past tense of swear is swore — but your ear hasn't changed at all. Miss a /sw/ cluster in dictation and then hear exactly where you missed it, and the next time you encounter it, your ear already has a marker in place. That's why a grammar-explanation page should end with listening, not with rereading.

If you want to understand why these sounds disappear and it isn't that you're a poor listener, the article on connected speech explains the mechanics of sound-dropping and linking for entire sentences, not just swore. Try it right away in the podcast library — every episode comes with a transcript.

Common phrases with swear, swore and sworn

Swear has a rare trait: almost every meaning of it has to come with a preposition, and changing the preposition changes the meaning entirely. So the table below mixes real phrasal verbs with fixed expressions and noun combinations, since all three types show up thickly in conversation. Most are written in the past or participle form so you get used to seeing them that way.

The last three rows show just how far sworn has drifted from its role as a verb. In "a sworn statement" and "sworn enemies," sworn is a full-fledged adjective standing in front of a noun, and it doesn't need have or be at all. This is the one exception to the rule from the section above, and it's easy to spot because right after sworn comes a noun, not the rest of the sentence.

The swear somebody in row is also worth noting because the object gets inserted in the middle. You say "they swore him in," not "they swore in him." In the passive form the phrase closes up into "he was sworn in," and that's the form you'll encounter most often in political news. If you listen to news podcasts a lot, this phrase turns up almost every week.

Mistakes Vietnamese learners commonly make with swear

Sweared. That's the reflex of tacking -ed onto every verb. Swear never conjugates regularly. There's only swore and sworn — no sweared, no swored, no swearen.

Did he swore at the referee. After did the verb goes back to its base form because did has already carried the tense. The correct sentence is "Did he swear at the referee?" This mistake tends to show up right after you've just learned that the past tense of swear is swore and you're remembering it a little too well.

He has swore and was swore in. Both of these sentences put the simple past where the participle should go. After have, has, had, and after any form of be, the form you need is sworn. This is the most common mistake across the whole wear, tear, bear, swear group, since these four verbs have V2 and V3 forms that differ by only a final n.

Confusing swear at with swear to. A single preposition flips the meaning entirely. "He swore at his boss" means he cursed at his boss. "He swore to his boss that he had finished" means he insisted to his boss that he had finished. Get the preposition wrong in a work email and the consequences aren't small.

Reading swear as if it rhymes with hear. The letter group ear is usually read /ɪər/ as in hear, near, fear, but swear, wear, bear, pear are read /eər/, rhyming with where. Reading it wrong carries over into mishearing it: if in your head swear rhymes with here, then when someone says /swer/ you won't recognize the word.

I swear you it is true. Swear, in the sense of making an oath, doesn't take a person directly as its object. The correct sentence is "I swear to you that it is true," or more simply "I promise you it is true." Also in this group, the two expressions "I swear to God" and the British way of saying "swear down" show up very thickly in conversation and in films, so you'll hear them constantly. Both belong strictly to casual speech — don't put them in writing or in a work email.

Quick exercise

Eight sentences — fill in swear, swears, swore, sworn or swearing. The answers are below, but you should attempt all the sentences yourself first.

1. The witness ______ to tell the truth before the hearing began.
2. She has ______ never to touch that machine again.
3. Did he really ______ at the referee?
4. The new mayor was ______ in on Monday morning.
5. My grandmother ______ by a spoon of honey every morning.
6. They were ______ loudly in the car park.
7. He ______ off sugar last January and kept it up.
8. The two teams have been ______ enemies for a decade.

Answers: 1. swore. 2. sworn. 3. swear. 4. sworn. 5. swore. 6. swearing. 7. swore. 8. sworn.

Questions 3 and 8 are the two sentences people get wrong most often. Question 3 has did in front of it, so the verb goes back to the base form, even though the whole sentence is clearly talking about the past. Question 8 isn't a verb slot at all: sworn here is an adjective standing before the noun enemies, so it doesn't need — and doesn't take — any other form. If you got these two wrong, the right/wrong table above is worth reading through once more.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the past tense of swear?

The simple past of swear is swore, the past participle is sworn. These two forms aren't interchangeable: swore serves as the main verb in a simple past sentence, while sworn always comes after have, has, had, or after a form of be.

Does swear mean "to vow" or "to curse"?

Both, and the preposition that follows decides which. Swear to or swear that means to vow and affirm. Swear at somebody means to curse at that person. Swear standing alone with no object almost always carries the meaning of cursing.

What does swear by mean?

It means trusting something absolutely, to the point of being willing to stake your word on it. "She swears by that brand of fish sauce" means she only uses that brand of fish sauce and trusts it far above the others. There's nothing rude in this phrase.

Why does swore often get misheard as sore?

Because the /w/ sound in the middle is a glide — it has no sound of its own and gets swallowed almost entirely when the sentence runs fast. The two words are otherwise identical in vowel and length. In British accents, where the final r isn't pronounced either, the gap between them narrows even further.

Do swear, wear, tear, bear conjugate the same way?

Almost identically. All four follow the pattern of the /eə/ vowel in the base form, /ɔː/ in the simple past, then add -n for the participle. The only place they differ is that bear has two participle forms: borne for the meaning of carrying/enduring, and born for the meaning of being born.

How long does it take to get used to hearing the /sw/ cluster at the start of a word?

The rules part only costs you one sitting. The ear part depends on your current listening base, and the most practical way to measure it is to transcribe a few dialogues and see how many places you drop the initial consonant. Take the listening level test before you start practicing, then measure again a few weeks later and you'll see it.

You can read through the form table for swear in thirty seconds, and that's the easiest part of this page. The rest — the fact that swore is only sore plus one glide, and sworn is only worn plus one compressed consonant cluster — only really sinks into your ear once you miss hearing it and then see where you transcribed it wrong. Pick a short episode and try dictation practice on a passage with swore or sworn in it, then go back to the table at the start of the article and see if it still looks obvious.