A past participle (participio) is a very useful verb form that can function as an adjective or as part of a perfect tense when used in conjunction with the verb haber. To form the past participle of a regular verb, you drop the infinitive ending (-ar, -er, -ir) and add -ado to the stem of -ar verbs and -ido to the stem of -er and -ir verbs. This is equivalent to adding -ed to many verbs in English.
Regular Past Participle Spanish forms:
How to form past participle form with regular verbs:
ar- verb – hablar – habl – hablado
er-verb – tener – ten – tenido
Many verbs have irregular past participles, and in the table below are a few of them:
Infinitive Past Participle English
| abrir | abierto | opened |
| decir | dicho | said |
| escribir | escrito | written |
| hacer | hecho | done |
| ver | visto | seen |
There are quite a few perfect tenses in Spanish and they all use past participles.
Haber + past participle
This example shows the past participle being used in the present perfect:
¿Has viajado mucho a Madrid?
Have you traveled a lot to Madrid?
Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in Spanish. When this is the case, they must agree in number and gender with the nouns they modify.
Me encantan los huevos revueltos
I love scrambled eggs.
A regular Past Participle is a verb form that is usually used with Perfect Tenses. In English, the Past Participle is formed by either adding “-ed” or “-en” to the infinitive form, for example, the Past Participle of the verb “to walk” is “walked”. More times than not, however, this just looks like the Simple Past Tense.