-ed endings pronunciation: t, d or id?

Practise one -ed line now

Open the -ed exercise

The exercise opens on one line from Oprah Winfrey’s talk at 6:01: “I was stressed, and I was frustrated.” It has two different endings: “stressed” ends in a T sound and stays one syllable, while “frustrated” adds a whole syllable, “id”. Listen to it, record your version, then open Compare and play your take beside the original.

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What Sada can and cannot tell you

Sada checks which of your words came across and how your timing compares with the speaker. It does not grade individual sounds. The -ed ending is one place where the word check helps: if you drop it and say “ask” for “asked” or “work” for “worked”, the word may show as missed or as a different word. But the recogniser may fill the ending in from context, it does not tell a T from a D, and it often accepts “worked” said with an extra syllable, so a matched word does not prove the ending was right.

Judge the ending by ear: play your take next to the speaker and count the syllables of each verb. To hear one word on its own, use a dictionary with audio such as Cambridge’s pronunciation dictionary; for sound-by-sound grading you need a teacher or a tool that scores individual sounds.

The -ed pronunciation rules: three sounds

Look at the last sound of the verb before -ed, not its last letter:

Voiceless and voiced work as they do in Arabic: put your fingers on your throat and say the verb’s last sound on its own. “Work” ends in a K, with no buzz, so “worked” ends in /t/. “Prepare” ends in an R, and the throat buzzes, so “prepared” ends in /d/. Either way the ending is a consonant that sticks to the verb, so “worked” stays one syllable.

The rule follows the sound, not the letter

In these verbs the spelling hides the last sound, so reading the letters leads you wrong:

Look at “judged”: “judge” is spelled with a D near the end, but its last sound is J, not D, so no syllable is added. A few adjectives keep the extra syllable, such as “naked” and “wicked”; when in doubt, listen to the word in a dictionary.

Five real lines to practise -ed endings online

Each line opens in Sada at its place in the talk. Before you record, mark each -ed verb: /t/, /d/ or /ɪd/?

“I was stressed, and I was frustrated.”

Oprah Winfrey · 6:01 · /t/ in “stressed” against /ɪd/ in “frustrated” · Practise this line →

“How can you get fired from a company you started?”

Steve Jobs · 6:09 · /d/ in “fired” against /ɪd/ in “started” · Practise this line →

“I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.”

Amy Cuddy · 17:02 · /t/ in “worked” four times, three of them running into “and” · Practise this line →

“And I’m always prepared to be amazed, and I'm never disappointed.”

Celeste Headlee · 11:09 · /d/ in “prepared” and “amazed”, /ɪd/ in “disappointed” · Practise this line →

“Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years,”

Dan Gilbert · 3:19 · the three consonants at the end of “asked”, then /ɪd/ in “expected” · Practise this line →

In line 3 the T of “worked” runs into the “and” after it, and in line 5 “asked” comes right before “people”. Listen to how this speaker says them in place, then say them the way you heard them. More on how words join in fast speech: connected speech practice.

Common mistakes of Arabic speakers

• “id” on every verb: reading the spelling adds a syllable to every verb, so “worked” becomes two syllables, “work-id”, and “stressed” becomes “stress-id”. The syllable belongs only after t or d, as in “frustrated” and “started”.
• A vowel to break up the consonants: Arabic words never end in three consonants in a row, and “asked” ends in three: S, K and T. So Arabic speakers tend to slip a vowel between them or drop one. Slow line 5 down until you hear all three, then say it at the speaker’s pace.
• Dropping the ending: in fast speech the -ed disappears and the verb changes tense, so “asked” comes out as “ask”. This is one of the mistakes Sada may catch, because “ask” is a different word.
• D instead of T: once you know the ending is not “id”, it is tempting to make it a D every time, so “stressed” ends in a D. After a voiceless sound the ending stays voiceless: /t/.

How to practise

1. Open an exercise from this guide. Put your fingers on your throat and say the verb’s last sound on its own: the K of “work” has no buzz, so “worked” ends in /t/; the R of “prepare” buzzes, so “prepared” ends in /d/.
2. Say the verbs in the table aloud in their three groups, and add the “id” syllable only after t or d: started, expected, disappointed.
3. Play line 1 and say it after the speaker in Repeat mode: “stressed” in one syllable, “frustrated” with “id” at the end.
4. Record a take, then open Compare and play your recording and the original. Review words and timing; Sada does not grade individual sounds.
5. Move from short lines to long ones, and go back to any line where an -ed verb was missed; the ending may have dropped.

Keep going

The other guides in this series, all written for Arabic speakers: P and B pronunciation, TH sound practice: “think” and “this”, V and F pronunciation, Word stress practice, Question intonation: rising and falling and Sentence stress: content and function words. All of these problems in order of how much each affects being understood, with one line for each and a short self-check: English pronunciation for Arabic speakers. For more lines to practise, from famous talks: Steve Jobs: Stanford Commencement Address (2005); Celeste Headlee: 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation; Chris Lonsdale: How to Learn Any Language in Six Months. To see what Sada checks in every take, read the pronunciation checker. For a wider plan, with word stress and the weak vowel: how to improve your English pronunciation.

Sources: word pronunciations from the Cambridge Dictionary; the three sounds of the -ed ending from English verbs.