I Pleaded, Then Pled
jwgh is running a little poll about the past tense of "plead": is it "plead" (pronounced and sometimes spelled "pled",) or is it "pleaded"? And is "pleaded" becoming more common?
I'm not really a linguist, but I decided to run a little experiment using the Google Books Ngram viewer. This lets you chart the frequency of particular words or combinations of words over a period of a couple centuries in published books. First, I tested "pled" versus "pleaded".
It looks like "pleaded" is decreasing in popularity, but it has always been way above "pled". This may be because "pled" is a low-frequency spelling, so I had to figure out a way to test the past participle spelled as "plead". I figured "has plead" vs. "has pleaded" might do the job:
A noticeable difference between "pled" and "has plead", but still very low frequency. It looks like "plead" as a past participle has always been the less common form. But I don't get why the frequency of "pleaded" is dropping.
(Addition: I did a check on "has pled" vs."has plead", too, to see which was the preferred form. It's gone back and forth every few decades, it turns out...)
I'm not really a linguist, but I decided to run a little experiment using the Google Books Ngram viewer. This lets you chart the frequency of particular words or combinations of words over a period of a couple centuries in published books. First, I tested "pled" versus "pleaded".
It looks like "pleaded" is decreasing in popularity, but it has always been way above "pled". This may be because "pled" is a low-frequency spelling, so I had to figure out a way to test the past participle spelled as "plead". I figured "has plead" vs. "has pleaded" might do the job:
A noticeable difference between "pled" and "has plead", but still very low frequency. It looks like "plead" as a past participle has always been the less common form. But I don't get why the frequency of "pleaded" is dropping.
(Addition: I did a check on "has pled" vs."has plead", too, to see which was the preferred form. It's gone back and forth every few decades, it turns out...)