I slept (or sleeped) and dreamt (or dreamed)

Some time ago I posted about the alternation between leaned and leant, dream and dreamt etc. I said that I had more-or-less decided to use leaned and dreamed, mostly because they are clearer for second-language listeners to understand, but then I quite naturally used leant when talking to one second-language listener. 

My work team has been working from home (mostly full-time but at least part-time) for almost two years. Alongside work-related emails, we send social/personal ones. One of my colleagues is studying psychology and is particularly interested in dreams. I can’t remember enough of most of my dreams, but occasionally one will persist after I wake up. A few days ago I sent an email with a brief description of my dream, starting “I dreamed …”. Another colleague picked me up this, so I explained the alternation and my decision, with a link to my blog post. She commented that the song from Les Misérables really couldn’t be I dreamt a dream. (With a side thought about the alternation between I dreamed/dreamt a dream and I dreamed/dreamt, and also I had a dream.) 

Along the way, because of its connection with dream, I also thought about sleep, which has the strong irregular form slept. But sleep now means something like to place a computer into a power saving mode. We can sleep a computer, and sleeping a computer is also common, but do we say I slept my computer or I sleeped a computer? At the moment, the usage isn’t common enough to be sure. There are a handful of results for I slept my computer and one for I sleeped my computer. Most people avoid the problem by putting their computer into sleep mode. Compare Stephen Pinker’s example of The batter flied out to centre (<my Australian-set auto-correct changed center to centre), not The batter flew out to centre. Because of my almost zero experience of baseball, I don’t have to worry about that, though.

Despite what I wrote in the title to this post, I definitely slept, but I may have dreamt or dreamed.

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leant/leaned

A small group of verbs have two past tense forms – an irregular one ending in -t and used more in British English and a regular one ending in -ed and used more in American English. The most common six are burn~burnt/burned, dream~dreamt/dreamed, lean~leant/leaned, learn~learnt/learned, smell~smelt/smelled and spill~spilt/spilled. Note that the pronunciation of the vowel changes with two of these: dream~/drɛmt/ / /dri:md/ and lean~/lɛnt/ / /li:nd/. [For some reason, I missed leap~leaped/leapt.]

In general, my Australian English usage is closer to British than America, but I have consciously decided to write -ed and say /dri:md/ and /li:nd/, probably because students are more likely to understand them.

A few days ago, I was talking to an English-as-a-second-language speaker. He asked me something which required me to use the past simple of lean. Without thinking about it, I found myself saying /lɛnt/. If he is not familiar with that pronunciation, I hope the context made it clear. I said something like “I lent over to pick up a sock and when I stood up, I knocked my head on the door handle”.