I think I have always used these two words interchangeably without noticing until my professor was saying how some students misspelled the word and he was amazed.
Can someone tell me when I should use paid over payed?
I searched for a similar question and got even more confused with this title: you paid for a persons drink and expect to be payed back.
Paid or payed is the past tense of pay depending on the sense of pay. The first sense is the usual one of giving someone money while the second sense is to seal (the deck or seams of a wooden ship) with pitch or tar to prevent leakage.
You should almost always use paid.
If you’re talking about money, or anything else that’s literally or figuratively acting like a transaction, then it’s paid: “Jane paid me ten dollars”, or “John played a practical joke on me, but I paid him back with a worse one!”
It’s only if you’re sailing, and dealing with ropes, that payed can be the correct form — “The skipper payed out the rope”, and similar.
If it's one of many tide payments to pay something (a complete amount) out, it makes sense to me to use payed but I can see how that would (without understanding of both different words) cause some conflict. It seems appropriate to use paid (and correct) if it's one single payment and payed if it's a link or chain of payments.
I'm coming at this from finance, not linguistics.
If you buy (partial) ownership when you invest (so buying stock instead of making a loan), you give over the right to distribute the returns made from your investment to the manager of the investment. They do not have to release those returns back to you in full or on a regular basis.
So, since this is their discretion, I think "dividends are payed out" not "dividends are paid out".
Here's another thought, based on this and other sites. There seem to be three appropriate uses of payed: 1) I payed out rope. 2) I payed out caulk. 3) I payed a visit [got this from another site].
I think the common thread there is that each involves some sort of attachment to something larger: 1) I payed out (some) rope (from a larger spool). 2) I payed out (some) caulk (from a larger tube). 3) I payed (some time to make) a visit (from my larger pool of free time).
If I'm correct, then my above answer that the correct form is "payed out dividends" because dividends come from a larger pool of profits earned from the investment.
What about the passive voice? In all the instances from the examples good people have submitted before me, there were references to the word "payed" that felt like the passive... to have something done to you by someone/something ELSE.
from Mr. Tufte: "Dividends ARE PAYED out"; Correct because of the passive voice, however #3) is NOT passive voice, so it must be PAID. "I" is the subject doing the "paying", and therefore active voice.
"Was payed out", the example from Mr. Hoffman would be correct because of the passive voice. Am I wrong? Let me know!
This may not be right, but my understanding was that payed was the past tense of pay and paid was the past participle of pay. Therefore as I understood:
I payed $100 on my account, so it should be all paid up.
"Is it paid?" "Yes. I payed it all."
