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On Oct 1st, I made my coffee, then checked the blog and read the line: She payed attention to my warnings about collaged materials surviving the aggressive USPS machinery.
The word *payed* looked goofy. I changed it to *paid* but then I wondered if payed was a word because it had not been spell-check-corrected. This happened at 6 am and I saw that over 600 people had already seen the blog and perhaps noted the mistake. It's not that I'm a stickler for spelling and grammar issues - but - I was curious - so I Googled payed vs paid and found some interesting info for anyone who is interested in this kind of minutia.
When to use payed or paid
The verb pay has multiple meanings. Its most common meanings relate to giving something as part of a financial transaction or obligation. You can pay when buying something, but you can also pay attention, pay a compliment, pay respects, pay a visit, and the list goes on.
In almost all cases, the past tense and past participle of pay is paid. When used in this way, pay is considered an irregular verb because it doesn’t use the ending -ed like regular verbs do.
However, the word payed is used as the past tense and past participle of pay in two very specific nautical senses.
The first means “to cover parts of a ship with pitch, tar, or similar coating.” The second means “to move a ship toward the direction of the blowing wind.”
In addition to these rarely used nautical senses, the form payed is also sometimes used to form the past tense of the phrasal verb pay out, which means “to gradually let out a rope.”
It should be noted paid out is also often used in this case (and considered acceptable by most grammar sources).
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