[Note: This post was updated on Sept. 3, 2026, to incorporate commentary from Merriam-Webster.]
Q: Why are pictures hung and people hanged?
A: Both past tenses have been around for hundreds of years, but it’s been customary since the 16th century to use “hanged” for executions and “hung” for other meanings.
Why? It’s an impossibly complicated history and takes up about a zillion (give or take) pages in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The short version is that the verb “hang” entered English in several different forms from different sources, and over the centuries, the present tense (variously “hing,” “hang,” “heng,” “hong”) stabilized as “hang.”
But the past tense and past participle took longer to sort itself (or themselves) out.
An essay in Merriam-Webster online explains that “the word hang came from two different verbs in Old English (and possibly also one from Old Norse). One of these Old English verbs was what we might think of as a regular verb, and this gave rise to hanged; the other was irregular, and ended up becoming hung.”
The past tense and past participle eventually stabilized as “hung,” a form popular in northern England that by the 16th century had spread to the south and superseded the many older forms for those tenses.
However, one old past tense and past participle, “hanged,” survived in a single sense: to put to death by hanging. The OED suggests that this archaic form was preserved in legal language, since it was used by judges to pronounce sentences in capital crimes.
If “hanged” is associated with the gallows, you might wonder why we use the phrase “hung in effigy.”
As Merriam-Webster explains, “most usage guides reserve hanged for people subjected to death, which means if an inanimate object is suspended from a gallows, the correct term is hung.” The dictionary’s example: “Despised by the voters, he was hung in effigy.”
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