plead / pleaded / pled

The verb to plead, meaning to make an appeal or argument, especially in a legal setting, comes to us from the Anglo-Norman French plaider. Since the Normans ruled England starting in 1066 and imported their own laws and legal system into England, many English legal terms come from Norman French. "Law French" was spoken in the courts during much of the Middle English period, and the French legal terms that survive to this day include: assizes, attorney, bailiff, culprit, defendant, escrow, estoppel, grand/petit jury, laches, mortgage, parole, tort, and voir dire.

We see plead, or rather plaide, in the thirteenth-century debate poem, The Owl and the Nightingale, where it is used in a general sense of to contend or debate:

Þeȝ we ne bo at one acorde,
We muȝe bet mid fayre worde,
Witute cheste & bute fiȝte,
Plaide mid foȝe & mid riȝte.

(Though we are not both of one accord, we might better with fair words, without emotion and free from fighting, plead with decency and correctness.)

The sense to argue a case in a legal setting appears in a Middle English life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria written c. 1300:

Nou is þis seide þat on; gret schame ich vunderstonde
An emperour to siche aboute; so wide in eche londe
After maistres to plaide; aȝen a ȝung wenche

(Now I understand this is said that with great shame an emperor searched about widely in each land for masters to plead against a young girl.)

According to the legend, Katherine won the argument against all the pagan philosophers, even converting one of them to Christianity, but Emperor Maxentius sentenced her to torture and death anyway.

Plead would be just another unremarkable borrowing from French following the Norman Conquest, but the verb has two past-tense and past-participial forms, pleaded and pled, and there is often wrangling over which is correct.

Both past-tense forms are equally old, so neither has primacy of age. But the irregular form pled disappeared in standard British usage, being retained only in Scottish and other dialects, but not before it made its way across the Atlantic and becoming firmly planted in American English. So in North America, both pleaded and pled can be found in both spoken and written English. Neither one can be considered “incorrect,” although the regular pleaded is by far the more common form in edited prose.

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 4, 2017, s.v. plaider, v.

Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003, lines 181–84, 6. London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fols 233r–246r.

D’Evelyn, Charlotte and Anna J. Mill, eds. “Saint Katherine.” In The South English Legendary, vol. 2 of 3. Early English Text Society 236. London: Oxford UP, 1956, lines 75–77, 535–36. London, British Library, MS Harley 2277. Internet Archive.

Garner, Bryan A. Garner’s Modern American Usage, third edition. Oxford University Press, 2009, s. v. pleaded; *pled; *plead.

Google Books Ngram Viewer, “pleaded, pled.” Accessed 25 July 2025.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. 1994, s. v. plead.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. pleten, v., pleien, v.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2006, s.v. plead, v.