Irregular past participles ending in -to/-cho

Spanish compound tenses use the past participle form of the verb, e.g., he hablado, has comido, hemos vivido.

Just as in English, not all past participles end in -ed (She has lived, she has worked, but she has done or she has written), Spanish is the same: some past participles are irregular and do not follow the regular -ado/-ido rule but rather have a different form.

Ending in -to: 

Let's look at some examples:

Note that these Spanish examples use El Pretérito Perfecto to show you the past participle, but the English translation usually  does not use the English past participle.

The irregular past participles are random! They don't follow any pattern so they need to be memorised. However once you know a verb has an irregular past participle, you know that most of their derivatives follow the same pattern.

For example:

Other verbs with an irregular past participles ending in -to are:

Ending in -cho:

Take a look at this table with the most common irregular past participles ending in -cho:

Here are some examples to listen to:

Ending in -so

There is one verb in Spanish which has an irregular past participle form that ends in -so:

Double participles

There are 3 Spanish verbs that accept two equally correct forms of the participle. Have a look:

For specific lessons on irregular past participles in El Pretérito Perfecto see:

• Conjugate ver in El Pretérito Perfecto (present perfect)
• Conjugate decir in El Pretérito Perfecto (present perfect)
• Conjugate hacer in El Pretérito Perfecto (present perfect)
• Conjugate poner and its derivatives in El Pretérito Perfecto (present perfect)

For more advanced uses of past participles see:

• Past participles as adjectives