What do you use for the past tense of "to text"?

[Signedcopy]

Why on earth would it be "text" not "texted"? As in "He text his friend" instead of "he texted his friend".

I know there are bigger issues but what the heck?

Texted. Especially if written!

It’s texted and it gives me the rage too 😆

Similarly, it's packed lunch, boxed set and shared house.

I sent a text

Of course you’re right OP and it’s definitely texted not text, but you’ll get a lot of people on this thread moaning that they shouldn’t be told how to write by the patronising pedants and they’ll write “text” if they like. I’ve never seen a MN thread on this topic go well, so put your flameproof pants on! 😆

Yep texted.

"Sent a text" because neither text nor texted sound right.

I say text even though I know it logically should be texted, because texted sounds clumsy and made up. Not very good reasoning but there you go. And I am a complete pedant so this makes no sense to me.

Texted. But plenty of people are wrong about this.

These days, it's often WhatsApped.

This is the shit show that happens when you shoehorn a noun into a verb.

I would write texted but I would say text because I find texted a bit of a mouthful

I love verbing a noun. Or should that be verbifying? ducks for cover

Oh they're very much on ready to defend me from the flaming!

I have never felt this (saying texted) was an issue but if it's an explanation for what seems to me to be a complete mangling of tense patterns, then that actually makes me feel a shade better about it.

100 per cent agree - this is a total bugbear of mine.

I tend towards texted, but we have other irregular verbs in the past tense so I don't feel rage about text. I agree with PP, texted can sometimes feel like a mouthful.
I wouldn't say the dog shitted on the rug either.

Although right, texted just sounds wrong to me. I tend to say messaged instead.

'Texted' feels right to me, and 'I text him and then he text me' gives me cringe, but I don't think it's as simple as me being right and the 'I text' folk being wrong.... there are precedents for that construction in this irregular language of ours...

Take 'every time I hit it, it falls off the wall.' And now, listen in your head to 'every time I hitted it, it...'

We do HAVE verbs that follow the text/text pattern, like 'hit' , but it still feels wrong to me. Can any of our pedants explain?

It depends if "to text" is a regular or irregular verb.

If it's regular, it works like any other English-language regular verb where the infinitive ends in -t:

To act; I acted.
To protect; I protected.
To start; I started.

There is some precedent for irregular verbs that follow the "to text; I text" pattern. We say "to cut; I cut" but "to gut; I gutted" because cut is an irregular verb and gut is a regular verb.

Who decides whether text is a regular or irregular verb? Unlike French (for example), English has no one final arbiter of language. But both UK English sources and international English sources seem to say that it's regular - therefore "I texted".

Texted. Text looks wrong and sounds wrong, texted is easier to say IMO.

Well no, but you wouldn't say the dog shit on the rug either (unless you were describing the offending article itself rather than the action of having produced it).

Sent a text sounds best but texted otherwise.

I agree but you could see it like an irregular verb (read / read). Language changes all the time as usage changes - even the Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges that. Also text was essentially a noun before we started sending texts (which are also nouns) and you don't conjugate a noun. It's just we now say sending a text is "texting".

Generally it’s the older, shorter, Saxon and Norse-derived verbs that are irregular, often because they pre-date the main French and Latinate influxes into English (in several waves from the Norman conquest onwards).

Text is itself a Latin loan-word (from “textus”, “text”), so it would normally naturally follow a regular form. A lot of our more formal Latinate register came into English from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards. Obviously “text” had the meaning of written language or book long before it came to mean SMS messages around the millennium!