Wound Is the Past Tense of Wind, Not an Injury

You're doing dictation listening practice on a passage describing a landscape. The speaker lets out a sentence, you write it down as "The road found its way down to the sea", and then the third word gets underlined in red. The real sentence is "The road wound its way down to the sea". You heard the diphthong right, you heard the final consonant cluster right, and you slipped on exactly one initial consonant. Quick answer first: the simple past of wind is wound, and the past participle is also wound. That word is pronounced /waʊnd/, rhyming with found, sound and ground.

Then you open the transcript to check, see the word wound, and read it as /wuːnd/. This is the second place you slip, and it's the real hard part of this page. Four different words in English share the same two spellings: wind meaning "air in motion" and wind meaning "to coil" are pronounced differently; wound as the past tense of wind and wound meaning "injury" are also pronounced differently. Nothing on the written page tells you which one you're looking at, and there's no trick except looking at where the word sits in the sentence.

This article works through the whole chain: the form table of wind, the group of verbs that change /aɪ/ to /aʊ/ that it belongs to along with find and grind, a map of the four words that share two spellings, the listening section with the odd fact that the sound is easier than the spelling, the phrasal verbs with wind, which are numerous and change meaning heavily, and the most frequently repeated mistakes.

• The form table of wind, and the find, bind, grind group
• Wound in a sentence, and the four words that share two spellings
• Hearing wound in real speech, where the ear has it easier than the eye
• Common phrases with wound
• Mistakes Vietnamese speakers often make with wind
• Quick exercises
• Frequently asked questions

The form table of wind, and the find, bind, grind group

Five forms of the verb wind in the sense of coil, wind up, or wind (of a road). The pronunciation column is given in the American accent, and for this verb the British accent isn't significantly different.

The pronunciation column is the most important column in this table, more important than the word column itself. The diphthong /aɪ/ in wind changes to /aʊ/ in wound. That's a regular change, and it isn't unique to wind.

wind belongs to a group of four verbs that do exactly the same thing: find becomes found, bind becomes bound, grind becomes ground, and wind becomes wound. All four end in nd, all four change /aɪ/ to /aʊ/, and all four use the same word for both the simple past and the past participle. If you've already got the pronunciation of found right, you can also get wound right, because they rhyme exactly.

Here's a real, usable trick: every time you see the word wound and don't know how to read it, try substituting found into the sentence. If the sentence still makes structural sense with a verb in that spot, then wound is read /waʊnd/. If that position calls for a noun, usually after a, the, his, her, then wound means "injury" and is read /wuːnd/.

This group has two more members with prefixes that you run into every day: rewind becomes rewound, and unwind becomes unwound. They follow the pattern exactly, with no exceptions. Learners often reflexively construct "rewinded" by adding ed, and that's one of the most common mistakes in the whole group.

Cross-reading a few articles in the same group will be faster than studying them one by one. The past tense of find is the most common member, and found is exactly the anchor you can lean on to pronounce wound correctly. The past tense of grind is the most interesting parallel case, because ground is both the past tense of grind and a noun meaning "the earth," meaning it has exactly the kind of collision that wound has. The past tense of read is worth reading because it's the most famous same-spelling-different-sound pair in English, where the spelling stays still but the sound changes — exactly the puzzle you're facing here. The article on English grammar pulls the tenses and verb groups together into one picture.

Wound in a sentence, and the four words that share two spellings

The grammar rule is brief: wound standing alone is the simple past, and following have, has, had or be it's the participle — and it's still the exact same word, wound. You don't have to choose between two forms. The only thing you have to do is not confuse it with a different word that happens to share the same spelling.

The last row of the table leads straight into the core of this section. In English there are four words sharing two spellings, and they're not related to each other at all. The table below is the complete map, and it's worth memorizing because it untangles the whole knot in just six lines.

The last two rows of the table are worth pausing on, because they explain something that often causes frustration. The word winded does exist, but it is not the past tense of wind in the "coil" sense. It comes from wind meaning "air," and in English the word for "air" also carries the meaning of "breath," so winded means "out of breath." "He was winded" means he couldn't catch his breath, not that someone wound him up.

The wounded row shows something easy to overlook: there are two completely different verbs here, and they conjugate in two different ways. The verb wind meaning "to coil" is irregular, giving wound. The verb wound meaning "to injure" is regular, giving wounded. Mixing these two up produces the sentence "He wound the soldier," which means he coiled the soldier up, not that he injured the soldier.

As for telling them apart while reading, it's simpler than you'd think, and it relies on position in the sentence rather than on meaning. After a, the, his, her, this, wound is a noun, read /wuːnd/. After a subject, or after have, has, had, was, were, been, wound is a verb, read /waʊnd/. Just those two lines will get you the right reading almost every time.

Hearing wound in real speech, where the ear has it easier than the eye

With most verbs, the listening part is harder than the reading part. With wind it's the opposite, and this is the single most notable thing on this whole page. In audio, /waʊnd/ and /wuːnd/ differ so clearly that no one could mix them up: one is a wide diphthong as in found, the other is a long rounded vowel as in moon. The speaker has already done the distinguishing for you. It's only the written word that hides that information.

wound rhymes with found, sound, ground, round. This is the thing that needs to be reinstalled before anything else, because many learners have already saved the pronunciation /wuːnd/ in their heads from first encountering this word in the "injury" sense. Read the sequence found, sound, ground, wound a few times until it settles into the right place.

The final /d/ sound is not released when it comes before a consonant. In "wound back," the /d/ becomes just an extremely short glottal catch, and the sentence rings out as "wown-back." In "wound down," it dissolves entirely into the /d/ of down, and the two words merge into a single block, "wown-down."

wound up joins into a single block. The /d/ sound leaves wound and goes to work as the initial consonant of up, coming out as "wown-dup". This is the chunk you'll meet most often with this verb, both in its literal sense of winding something up and its figurative sense of ending up somewhere, so recognizing the whole block will save you a lot of time spent sounding out syllables.

The initial consonant /w/ is the blurriest part of the word. It has no noise, no burst of air, it's just a rounding of the lips sliding into the vowel. When the word before it ends in a consonant, this /w/ is almost swallowed whole, and what's left of wound is exactly the rhyme it shares with found. That's the very trap this article opened with.

In an episode about weather, both spellings of wind show up together. "The wind wound around the headland" is a perfectly ordinary descriptive sentence, and it contains two different words spelled almost the same. When you hear it, there's no problem at all, /wɪnd/ and /waʊnd/ are worlds apart. It's only when you write it down and read it back that things get tangled.

has and have before wound are almost invisible. "It has been wound" in speech compresses into "it's been wown", with both has and been shrinking down to very short sounds. Miss that part and you end up writing "it wound", a sentence that's still grammatical but wrong in both tense and form.

The table below lays out one sentence across three states, from how it's written to how it sounds to how it gets mis-transcribed. What's in the middle column is the sound reaching the ear, not phonetic symbols from a textbook.

Looking at the third column, you can see three different kinds of error. Lines one and two are initial-consonant errors: the /w/ sound is so faint that the ear fills the gap with a closer-rhyming word it's more familiar with, found or won. Line three is a linking error: the /d/ has jumped over to the next word, and the transcriber has cut the sentence in the wrong place. Lines four, five, and six are the third kind, and it's the most interesting one: the transcriber heard correctly but built the spelling from what they already knew, so wound becomes wounded and rewound becomes rewinded. The ear isn't wrong at all, it's just that the mental word-store is missing an entry.

In a dictation session on WELE, this chain of events plays out very concretely, and for wind it gives a kind of feedback that reading a grammar book never can. You hear a sentence with /waʊnd/, you type it out, and then the corrected version pops up with the word wound. At that exact second, two things collide: the sound you just heard and the spelling you've always been reading wrong. This is the most effective way to untangle a pair of homographs, because it forces the sound and the spelling to meet in the same instant.

By contrast, if you only read and never listen, this pair is almost impossible to untangle on your own. You come across the word wound on the page, read it silently the way you're used to, and there's nothing to contradict you and tell you you're wrong. Plenty of people who've studied English for ten years still read "he wound the clock" as /wuːnd/ for exactly that reason. To understand why initial and final consonants disappear in fast speech, the article on connected speech explains the mechanics of linking and elision across a whole sentence. And the podcast library comes with built-in transcripts, so you can check yourself right after every sentence.

Common chunks with wound

Unlike many narrow verbs, wind spins off a huge number of real phrasal verbs, and these chunks shift meaning drastically away from the original sense. The thirteen lines below are all written in the past or participle form, since that's the form you'll run into most often.

The first two lines of the table are where you need to be most careful, since the same chunk carries two meanings that are worlds apart. "He wound up the cable" means he coiled the cable up. "He wound up in hospital" means he ended up in the hospital. Both are common, and what distinguishes them is what comes after: an object gives the literal sense, a place or a situation gives the figurative one.

The line wound up as an adjective is also worth remembering on its own, because it comes up so often in conversation. "She was wound up" doesn't say she was coiled up, it says she was strung as tight as a wire. The original image really is a clockwork mechanism wound all the way up, and Vietnamese has a similar way of putting it when you say someone is "too wound up."

There's also a point about tense. "They wound the project down last year" places the event at a closed point, as if recounting it. "They have wound the project down" says that the project is no longer running right now, and the sentence carries the tone of a status update. And the thing that separates the two sentences is the word have, compressed down to almost nothing, exactly the part your ear has the hardest time catching.

Mistakes Vietnamese learners commonly make with wind

Reading wound as /wuːnd/ when it's the verb. This is the number one mistake on this whole page, and it's quieter than any other mistake because no one corrects you when you're reading silently. "He wound the clock" is read /waʊnd/, rhyming with found. The check mentioned in section two still applies: try substituting found, if the sentence still works, read it as /waʊnd/.

winded in place of wound. "He winded the clock" is wrong. winded does exist but means out of breath, and it comes from the wind that means moving air, not the wind that means to coil. This is a kind of mistake a dictionary won't help much with, since looking up winded still turns up an entry.

rewinded and unwinded. These two verbs with prefixes follow the exact pattern of the base verb: rewound and unwound. The reflex to add ed is especially strong here because rewind is a modern word, tied to tapes and to the rewind button, so many people don't think of it as an old irregular verb.

Using wound after did. "Did she wound the cable up?" is wrong for the meaning you intend, and worse, it's grammatically correct with a different meaning: it ends up asking whether she injured the cable. did already carries the past tense, so the verb goes back to its base form: "Did she wind the cable up?"

Mixing up the two verbs wound. The verb wind meaning to coil is irregular, giving wound. The verb wound meaning to injure is regular, giving wounded. "Two soldiers were wound in the attack" is wrong, it should be wounded. Conversely, "She wounded the rope around the post" is also wrong, it should be wound.

Using wound up figuratively where it doesn't fit. "We wound up staying longer" carries a sense of something unplanned, usually a bit unwanted. If you mean to describe something good that was planned, this phrase throws off the tone of the sentence. "We ended up" is more neutral, while "we decided to stay" is the sentence for an active decision.

Here's one more thing that's out there to be heard but not to be used. You'll come across both "winded" and "rewinded" with the meaning of winding and rewinding in casual speech, especially from children and in online comments. They really do occur, but they're counted as wrong on tests, in work emails, and in any text that gets proofread. The standard forms remain wound and rewound.

Quick exercise

Eight sentences, fill in wind, winds, wound, winding, rewound, or wounded. A few sentences are deliberately set as traps between the two word families. Do them all first, then look down at the answer section.

1. She ______ the cable around her hand and put it in the drawer.
2. Did he ______ the clock before he left for the weekend?
3. The road ______ its way up through the hills for an hour.
4. Two soldiers were ______ in the attack on Tuesday.
5. We ______ up staying much longer than we had planned.
6. He ______ the tape back and played the last minute again.
7. The ______ on his arm was still bandaged a week later.
8. The clock has not been ______ since Christmas.

Answers: 1. wound. 2. wind. 3. wound. 4. wounded. 5. wound. 6. rewound. 7. wound, pronounced /wuːnd/. 8. wound.

Sentences 4 and 7 are the two worth pausing on, and they don't test the verb wind at all. Sentence 4 needs wounded because that's a completely different verb, meaning to injure, and it conjugates regularly. Sentence 7 needs a noun, that is, the word wound pronounced /wuːnd/, not the past-tense form. If you filled in wound for sentence 4 or wounded for sentence 7, the six-line map in section two is worth reading again, because that's exactly where the four words overlap.

Frequently asked questions

What is the past tense of wind?

The simple past and past participle of wind, in the sense of winding, coiling, winding up, or winding (a road), are both wound. It's pronounced /waʊnd/, rhyming with found and sound, not /wuːnd/ like the word wound meaning an injury.

How is wound pronounced?

It depends on which word it is. When wound is the past tense of wind, it's pronounced /waʊnd/. When wound is the noun meaning an injury, it's pronounced /wuːnd/. A quick check is to try substituting found: if the sentence still works, it's /waʊnd/; if that spot calls for a noun, usually after a, the, his, her, then it's /wuːnd/.

Is wound in "he wound the clock" the same word as wound in "a deep wound"?

No, they are two completely different words, unrelated, that just happen to be spelled the same. They differ in pronunciation, in part of speech, and in origin. English has a few pairs like this, and the most famous pair is read and read.

Is winded the past tense of wind?

Yes, but not of the verb you're looking for. winded /ˈwɪndɪd/ means out of breath, breathless, and it comes from wind meaning air in motion, since in English the word for wind also carries the sense of breath. For the meaning of winding or winding up, the past tense is always wound.

What is the past tense of rewind?

rewound, not rewinded. In the same pattern is unwind, which becomes unwound. The whole group find, bind, grind, wind all change /aɪ/ to /aʊ/, and the prefixed forms follow that same pattern.

How long does it take to stop mixing up these heteronym pairs?

The rule part you can grasp in ten minutes, since the map only has six lines. The reflex part needs repeated exposure in real sentences, and the lucky thing is that the sound clearly distinguishes these two words, so listening a lot will untangle it faster than reading a lot. The listening level test gives you a benchmark for picking material at the right level before you start.

You can finish reading the form table for wind in twenty seconds, since there's only one word to remember. The rest, the fact that four words share two spellings and that wound rhymes with found and not with moon, only sinks in once you hear a sentence with /waʊnd/ and then see the word wound show up next to it. Pick a short episode and try dictation listening practice on a passage with wound or wound up, then go back to the six-line map in section two and see if it's still confusing.