2826: Origins of Hanged-Hung Split Sep 15, 2024

Everyone knows that the past tense of ‘hang’ is ‘hung’ except in the context of execution in which case it’s ‘hanged’, but why is that?

As discussed in yesterday’s post, when there is a semantic split between strong and weak forms of a verb, as there is here, the basic sense (as in “he hung a picture”) is strong and the more distant sense, referring to execution, is weak (“they hanged a criminal”). What’s notable about this set up is that ‘hanged’ is the ‘older’ form, and ‘hung’ only started to develop in the late 16th century. While the trend for most verbs is that strong forms are giving way to weak ones (see more on that here), there are a few that have bucked this trend, like ‘hung’ and more recently ‘snuck’. Either direction however, in many cases, the older form clung on in specific contexts, though even that has changed for ‘hanged’, which used to be used in all formal and especially legal contexts, but phrases like a ‘hung jury’ do not use the weak form.