The Past Tense of Withdraw Is Withdrew: Catching the Swallowed First Syllable

You're doing dictation listening practice on a conversation at a bank counter. The speaker lets out a sentence, you write it down as "I drew two million from the ATM," and the red underline lands right on the second word. The real sentence was "I withdrew two million from the ATM." You didn't mishear the whole thing, you missed exactly one unstressed syllable at the start of the word. Quick answer first: the simple past of withdraw is withdrew, and the past participle is withdrawn. There's no withdrawed, and no withdrawned either.

This verb has two very specific trouble spots. First, its stress falls on the second syllable, so the with- at the front gets squeezed down until it nearly disappears, and what's left in your ear is just drew or drawn. Second, withdraw comes with a very commonly used noun, withdrawal, and learners keep grabbing that noun and dropping it into the verb slot, producing sentences like "I want to withdrawal money."

This article goes through the whole chain: the form table for withdraw and the draw family it inherits from, when to use withdrew versus withdrawn, the six different meanings this one verb carries, how the three forms sound in real spoken sentences at the counter and in the news, common phrases, six common mistakes, and a short exercise.

• The form table for withdraw and the draw family
• Withdrew stands alone, withdrawn comes with an auxiliary verb
• Hearing withdrew and withdrawn in real speech
• Common phrases with withdrew and withdrawn
• Mistakes Vietnamese learners often make with withdraw
• Quick exercise
• Frequently asked questions

The form table for withdraw and the draw family

Five basic forms, transcribed in the American accent, with British differences noted where they're clearly different.

If you cover up the with- part, the table above turns into exactly the table for draw: draw, drew, drawn. That's not a coincidence. In English, an irregular verb with a prefix attached keeps the same conjugation as the root verb. stand becomes stood, so understand becomes understood and withstand becomes withstood. come becomes came, so become becomes became. give becomes gave, so forgive becomes forgave. take becomes took, so mistake becomes mistook. This rule has almost no exceptions, and it saves you a lot of memorization work.

The more interesting part is the with at the front. It doesn't carry the meaning of "together with" as in "go with me." This is an old with, inherited from Old English, with the opposite meaning: against, away from, apart. That old meaning survives today in exactly three verbs: withdraw means to pull back, pull away, withhold means to hold back, not give, withstand means to stand firm against a pressure. Outside those three words, the old with has died out completely.

Knowing this detail is genuinely useful, not just for show. When you meet withhold for the first time in a contract, you don't have to look it up: it's hold in the reverse sense, meaning to hold back. And its past tense is withheld, exactly like held. By the same logic, the past tense of withstand is withstood.

A few verbs worth reading alongside this one, each for a different reason: the past tense of draw is the root of the whole table above, so reading it means you've already got withdraw covered, the past tense of understand illustrates exactly the rule you just read about prefixed verbs keeping the same conjugation, and the past tense of hold is worth checking out because withhold borrows its entire table. Zooming out, the article English grammar connects the tenses to each group of verbs.

Withdrew stands alone, withdrawn comes with an auxiliary verb

The simplest rule: withdrew works as the main verb of the sentence by itself, while withdrawn never stands alone and always needs have, has, had, or be in front of it. Because withdraw appears very heavily in the passive voice, the form you'll run into most in news articles and notices is exactly withdrawn.

The part that really causes confusion isn't grammar though, it's meaning. This one verb, withdraw, carries at least six different meanings, and Vietnamese translates them with words that have nothing to do with each other. The table below lays out six short sentences so you can see that gap.

The fifth line is the heaviest trap. In the sentence "He has been very withdrawn," withdrawn isn't the participle of any action at all, it's a standalone adjective describing personality, close to the word "closed-off" in Vietnamese. The giveaway is clear: it follows be and is preceded by a degree adverb like very, quite, rather. No object, no "by" anyone.

A direct comparison makes it obvious. "The offer was withdrawn by the company" is passive, there's someone carrying out the action. "He was withdrawn at dinner" describes a state, nobody is doing anything to him. Same word, two completely different roles.

So when do you pick withdrew over has withdrawn? Still the general tense rule: if the sentence has a closed time marker like yesterday, last Friday, in 2019, two hours ago, use withdrew. No marker, and you're talking about a result that's still relevant now, use has withdrawn or has been withdrawn.

Hearing withdrew and withdrawn in real speech

This is the part you won't find in any conjugation table, and for withdraw it matters more than usual, because this is a word you hear far more than you say. You run into it at the ATM, in bank notifications, in sports news when someone pulls out of a tournament, in international news when troops withdraw. All places where people talk fast and read off a script.

The consonant cluster in the middle of the word collapses down to one sound. On paper it's -thd-, two consonants next to each other. In the mouth, the /ð/ sound and the /d/ sound are made at almost the same place with the tongue, so speakers don't separate them out. What comes out is "wi-draw," sounding like there's only one consonant.

The first syllable carries no stress, so it's almost invisible. The stress falls on -draw. The with- part shrinks down to one very faint /wə/ sound and sometimes fuses right into the word before it. The result is that "I withdrew" sounds very close to "I drew," and this is the number one reason learners mis-transcribe this word.

withdrew and withdraw differ only in the final vowel. /druː/ versus /drɔː/. To Vietnamese ears, these two vowels are much closer together than the phonetic chart suggests, so the past-tense sentence and the present-tense sentence swap places very easily. The clue that saves you usually isn't the word itself but the time marker that follows it.

The final /n/ sound in withdrawn tends to fuse into the next word. "withdrawn from the market" comes out as "withdraw-nfrom," while "has been withdrawn" has its /n/ dissolve into the pause. Once the /n/ is lost, withdrawn and withdraw become one and the same.

In real speech, withdrawal often comes down to just three beats. The dictionary lists four syllables, but ordinary speakers compress it into "wi-DRAW-ul". If you're waiting to hear all four beats, you'll mistakenly transcribe it as the verb withdraw.

has been and was before withdrawn are both unstressed function words. "It's been withdrawn" in real speech becomes "itsbin withdrawn", with been reduced to one short sound. Missing that part gets you "It withdrawn", a grammatically wrong sentence that your ear finds perfectly reasonable.

The example sentences below come with their actual sound and common mistranscriptions. The middle column shows how the sentence sounds in real life, not its standard phonetic transcription.

Looking at the third column, you'll see the mistakes fall into three different categories. Row one is a lost-unstressed-syllable error: your ear correctly hears the stressed part and drops the beginning, so withdrew shrinks down to drew. Rows three and five are word-category boundary errors: you hear the sound chunk but don't know whether it's functioning as a noun or an adjective, so your hand writes down the most familiar verb form. Rows two and six are function-word errors and reflexive-ending errors — meaning the ear is correct but the grammar in your head interferes.

A dictation session on WELE lays that whole error-correction chain out in front of you. You transcribe the sentence exactly as you just heard it, the scoring pinpoints the exact word that's off, and you see what you wrote placed right next to the real word. When the flagged word is withdrew and you wrote drew, you get a piece of information that reading a verb conjugation table never gives you: your ear is skipping the unstressed syllables at the start of the word. That's a listening habit, and it affects hundreds of other words, not just withdraw.

The real memory anchor is the moment you see exactly where you transcribed wrong. After reading the five-row table at the start of this article, ten minutes later you still know withdrew is the past tense of withdraw, but your ear hasn't changed at all. Miss a sentence containing withdrawn, then hear back the exact spot you missed, and the next time you encounter it, your ear already has a reference point ready. If you want to understand why these sounds disappear rather than assume you're just bad at listening, the article on connected speech explains the mechanism of sound-swallowing and linking across a whole sentence. And if you want to try it right now on real sentences, the podcast library has transcripts ready for you to check against after each dictation.

Common phrases with withdrew and withdrawn

withdraw doesn't spawn phrasal verbs the way go or put does. What it spawns are collocations — words that pair with it so often they become a fixed chunk — plus one accompanying noun, withdrawal. The thirteen rows below are all in past or participle form, to get you familiar with how they look.

The first three rows and the fourth are worth learning as one connected chunk, because this is the English you encounter at the ATM and in banking apps. The screen usually prints Withdraw on the button but Withdrawal on the transaction history line, and the two words aren't interchangeable. The button is an action, so it takes the verb; the history line is an event that already happened, so it takes the noun.

The last row is the easiest one to mistranslate. withdraw into oneself isn't about pulling something out of somewhere — it describes a person retreating into themselves, meaning they go noticeably quieter and avoid contact. It's actually the root of the adjective meaning of withdrawn that you met in the table above, and when you read novels or listen to psychology podcasts, you'll come across both forms.

Mistakes Vietnamese learners often make with withdraw

withdrawed and withdrawned. This is the reflex error of adding -ed to every verb. withdraw conjugates like draw, so there's only withdrew and withdrawn. There's no withdrawed, no withdrawned, and no withdrewed either.

Did you withdrew. The past meaning belongs to did, and the verb that follows goes back to the base form. "Did you withdraw the money?" is the correct version. This mistake tends to show up right when you're concentrating hard on remembering that the past tense of withdraw is withdrew.

have withdrew, was withdrew. After have, has, had, or be it must be withdrawn. Because withdraw lives mainly in the passive voice in announcements and news reports, this mistake shows up far more often than with other verbs. "The offer has been withdrawn" is a sentence you need to memorize as a whole chunk.

Using the noun withdrawal in place of the verb. The sentence "I want to withdrawal money" is wrong; the correct version is "I want to withdraw money". Conversely, "confirm the withdraw amount" is also wrong — it should be "the withdrawal amount". You'll hear some bank staff say "to withdrawal funds" as a kind of professional jargon, but it isn't considered standard, and in an exam or a work email it counts as a mistake.

Taking the adjective withdrawn for a passive participle. "He is very withdrawn" doesn't mean he's been withdrawn from something. It's an adjective describing personality, meaning closed-off, not very communicative. The tell is a degree adverb standing in front of it, with no object or by-phrase following.

Wrong preposition. Withdrawing money is withdraw money from an account or from an ATM, not in the ATM. Withdrawing from a competition is withdraw from a race, not withdraw out of a race. And withdraw doesn't pair with out as a phrasal verb — the combination "withdraw out" doesn't exist in standard English.

Quick exercise

Eight sentences. Fill in withdraw, withdrew, withdrawn, or withdrawal. Don't scroll down to the answers while any sentence is still unfilled.

1. Yesterday I ______ enough cash for the whole week.
2. The product has been ______ from every store.
3. Did she ______ her application in the end?
4. There is a fee on every cash ______ over one million.
5. Two teams ______ from the tournament last season.
6. He has been rather ______ since he changed jobs.
7. You can ______ your consent at any point.
8. The troops were ______ over a period of three months.

Answers: 1. withdrew. 2. withdrawn. 3. withdraw. 4. withdrawal. 5. withdrew. 6. withdrawn. 7. withdraw. 8. withdrawn.

Sentences 4 and 6 are worth pausing on. Sentence 4 has the article "every" before the blank and "cash" modifying it, meaning the blank needs a noun, so the answer is "withdrawal", not "withdraw". Sentence 6 isn't talking about any act of withdrawing at all — it describes a person's state, so "withdrawn" here is an adjective. If you got these two wrong, the meaning table above is worth reading again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the past tense of withdraw?

The simple past is withdrew, the past participle is withdrawn. It conjugates exactly like draw, drew, drawn, because with- is just a prefix, and a prefix doesn't change how the root verb conjugates.

Withdrew or withdrawn — which one do you use?

Look at whether there's an auxiliary verb before the blank. If there's have, has, had, or be, use withdrawn. If there's nothing before it, use withdrew. "She withdrew the money" is correct, "The money has been withdrawn" is correct, "She has withdrew the money" is wrong.

How are withdraw and withdrawal different?

withdraw is a verb, withdrawal is a noun. The button on an ATM says Withdraw because it's an action. The line in a transaction history says Withdrawal because it's an event that already happened. The sentence "I want to withdrawal money" is a very common mistake — the correct form is withdraw.

Does withdrawn mean reserved, or does it mean taken out?

Both, depending on the sentence. When there's an object or a "by" phrase after it, it's a passive participle, meaning it has been withdrawn or revoked. When it follows be and has very, quite, or rather before it, it's an adjective describing personality, meaning quiet and reserved.

Why does withdrew get heard and transcribed as drew?

Because the stress falls on the second syllable, while the with- syllable at the start carries no stress and gets squeezed down to the point of almost disappearing. This is a general listening habit, not something specific to this word, and it affects every word with an unstressed prefix. If you want to measure how far off your ear currently is, the listening level test gives you a benchmark to check back against after a few weeks.

Do withhold and withstand conjugate the same way as withdraw?

Yes, same logic. withhold conjugates like hold, so its past tense is withheld. withstand conjugates like stand, so its past tense is withstood. These three words are all that's left of the old word "with," carrying the meaning "against, apart."

You can read through the form table for withdraw in thirty seconds, and that's the easiest part of this page. The rest — the way the first syllable gets swallowed until withdrew is left as nothing but drew in your ear — only really changes once you mishear it and then see where you transcribed it wrong. Pick a short passage with withdrew or withdrawn and try dictation practice once, then go back to the table at the top of the article and see if it still looks dry to you.