Is it focussed or focused?
When adding -ing and -ed to verbs, we sometimes double the consonant beforehand. People are often confused with ‘benefitted/benefited’, ‘focussed/focused’ and ‘targetted/targeted’. This tip answers some of those queries.
The official requirements are that we ‘double a single consonant letter at the end of any base where the preceding vowel is spelled with a single letter and stressed’.
What does this mean in practice?
Examples:
| word | present participle | past participle |
|---|---|---|
| bar | barring | barred |
| beg | begging | begged |
| occur | occurring | occurred |
| permit | permitting | permitted |
| patrol | patrolling | patrolled |
It is true to say that there is usually no doubling when the preceding vowel is unstressed (‘enter’ becomes ‘entering/entered’; ‘visit’ becomes ‘visiting/visited’) or when the preceding vowel is written with two letters (‘dread’ becomes ‘dreading/dreaded’).
Some words change their spelling to cope (they add a letter ‘k’).
| word | present participle | past participle |
|---|---|---|
| panic | panicking | panicked |
| traffic | trafficking | trafficked |
| frolic | frolicking | frolicked |
| bivouac | bivouacking | bivouacked |
What about ‘focus’?
This word can take either double or single s, with the single option being highly preferred.
| word | present participle | past participle |
|---|---|---|
| focus | focusing/focussing | focused/focussed |
Here’s an odd one to end:
| American | British English |
|---|---|
| parallel | parallel |
| paralleling | parallelling |
| paralleled | parallelled |
Example:
The vetting service from Future Perfect is unparallelled.