Please note that there is no such word as ‘bidded’
What you need to know:
The writer and sub-editor hope to bung the semantic hole simply by adding the element ded to the infinitive form bid.
To be quite sure, an additional ed is the simplest way by which, as your teacher of English has told you, you can transform a verb into its simple past tense.
But it is only one among umpteen. Owe nowadays becomes owed. But, once upon a time, ought was its simple past tense form.
In a page-10 blurb in last week’s Sunday Nation, a sub-editor posed the following question: “Why would the state sell (a certain) mill for an amount less than previously bidded?”
In the phrase “...for an amount less than”, the words “an amount” are completely needless.
In the context, the words “for less than” would have sufficed. Never use any word that does not add any communicative value to your statement.
For it can only obscure your meaning. But that’s by the way. Though I knew what the sub-editor meant, the word “bidded” caught my attention.
The verb to bid has up to half a dozen meanings. But let us confine ourselves to the context in which the writer was operating.
There, as collins reminds us, to bid is simply “...to make an offer...” “Goodbye” is one “offer” that you usually make to your friends, relatives and visitors whenever they depart (on a journey).
Another, as the dictionary points out, is the amount of money that a would-be buyer proposes (or offers) to pay for a commodity in a shop or marketplace.
The problem is that “bidded” is not among its three past tense forms with which I am familiar.
The writer and sub-editor hope to bung the semantic hole simply by adding the element ded to the infinitive form bid.
TRANSFORM A VERB
To be quite sure, an additional ed is the simplest way by which, as your teacher of English has told you, you can transform a verb into its simple past tense.
But it is only one among umpteen. Owe nowadays becomes owed. But, once upon a time, ought was its simple past tense form.
That is why English still says of all our moral debts that we ought to repay them.
But, although English is not your mother tongue, if you work in an English-language medium, you ought to know that adding an ed is not the only way that you can transform an infinitive verb into its simple past.
You owe it to your employer and customers. Otherwise, instead of forgot, we would say “forgetted”, and instead of went, we would say “goed”.
At any rate, there is simply no such word as “bidded” in English. Bade is the simple past tense form of the verb to bid, as in: “I bade him farewell”.
In all three tenses, the perfect form is not bidded but bidden.
For example: “I have bidden him farewell” (present perfect); “I had bidden him farewell” (past perfect), and “I will have bidden him farewell” (future perfect).
Bad was once the simple past tense form of bid. But it is fully obsolete. Today it may be found only in the past tense forms of certain complex verbs, usually only either in religious scriptures or in poetry.
In poetic licence, for instance, forbad (without an “e”) may come in handy whenever you need a word to rhyme with, for example, Sinbad, celebrated by certain charming tales around the inimitable Harun al Rashid of Baghdad.