English has one passive verb: to be. "The letter is written," "the house is sold," "the windows are cleaned" — all built with be + past participle. Dutch splits this job between two auxiliaries, and getting them straight is one of the genuine pay-offs of intermediate Dutch. This page covers the first and most common one: the dynamic passive with worden + past participle, which describes an action in progress or as a process. De brief wordt geschreven means "the letter is being written" — right now, the writing is happening. The other auxiliary, zijn, describes the resulting state and is covered on its own page (verbs/passive/zijn-passive). The single most important idea to carry away is this: Dutch grammatically distinguishes the process (wordt geschreven, "is being written") from the resulting state (is geschreven, "is written / has been written"), a distinction English flattens into one ambiguous "is written."
The form: worden + past participle
The dynamic passive uses the auxiliary worden (literally "to become"), conjugated for person and tense, plus the past participle of the main verb, which goes to the end of the clause inside the verb bracket (see word-order/verb-bracket).
| Tense | Form | Example |
|---|---|---|
| present sing. | wordt + participle | De brief wordt geschreven |
| present plur. | worden + participle | De ramen worden gewassen |
| past sing. | werd + participle | De brief werd geschreven |
| past plur. | werden + participle | De ramen werden gewassen |
De brief wordt geschreven.
The letter is being written. — process in progress, 'wordt' + 'geschreven'.
Het huis wordt verkocht.
The house is being sold. — the selling is underway, not finished.
De brief werd gisteren geschreven.
The letter was (being) written yesterday. — past tense 'werd geschreven'.
The auxiliary worden means "to become", and that is the perfect intuition for this passive: the subject is becoming affected by the action. De brief wordt geschreven — the letter is becoming written, the process is unrolling. Hold on to "becoming", and the worden-passive will feel natural.
The agent: marked with door
When you want to say by whom the action is done, Dutch marks the agent with the preposition door ("by"). The door-phrase typically sits in the middle of the clause, before the participle.
De ramen worden gewassen door de schoonmaker.
The windows are being cleaned by the cleaner. — agent 'door de schoonmaker'.
Het rapport wordt door de directeur ondertekend.
The report is being signed by the director. — agent 'door de directeur' inside the bracket.
De kinderen worden door hun oma opgehaald.
The children are being picked up by their grandmother. — separable 'opgehaald' at the end.
Two things English speakers get wrong here. First, the preposition is door, not bij or met — bij would mean "near/at", met would mean "with (an instrument)". De brief wordt met een pen geschreven means "with a pen" (instrument); door Jan means "by Jan" (agent). Second, the agent is genuinely optional and is omitted far more often than in English textbooks suggest — Dutch is perfectly happy to leave the doer unstated when it's irrelevant: De ramen worden gewassen ("the windows are being cleaned") needs no agent at all.
De brief wordt met de hand geschreven, niet getypt.
The letter is written by hand, not typed. — 'met' marks the instrument/manner, not the agent.
Why "becoming" and not "being": the process vs state split
This is the conceptual heart of the page, and the place where English intuitions fail. English "the house is sold" is ambiguous: it can mean the selling is happening (process) or that the house has been sold and is now gone (state). Dutch refuses this ambiguity and forces you to choose:
| Dutch | Meaning | English |
|---|---|---|
| Het huis wordt verkocht | process underway | The house is being sold |
| Het huis is verkocht | resulting state | The house is (already) sold |
De winkel wordt om zes uur gesloten.
The shop is closed (i.e. someone closes it) at six. — the act of closing, a recurring process.
De winkel is nu gesloten.
The shop is now closed. — the resulting state; this uses 'zijn', not 'worden'.
So worden = the action happening; zijn = the state afterwards. Choosing zijn where you mean the ongoing process is the single most common passive error English speakers make, precisely because English lets one sentence ("the house is sold") cover both. Whenever you mean "is being _-ed", reach for worden. The resulting-state half of this split is the subject of verbs/passive/zijn-passive.
A note on the perfect
When you push the worden-passive into the perfect ("has been written"), Dutch does something that surprises everyone: it drops the worden entirely and uses zijn + participle. De brief is geschreven can therefore mean either "the letter is written" (state) or "the letter has been written" (perfect of the passive). That triple-duty is + participle is the key complication of the whole system — and because it belongs to zijn, it's handled in detail on verbs/passive/zijn-passive. For now, just know that worden covers the present and past process passive, and you will not see is geworden geschreven; the perfect lives with zijn.
De brief is al verstuurd.
The letter has already been sent. — perfect of the passive; the 'worden' has dropped, 'zijn' remains.
Common Mistakes
❌ Het huis is verkocht. (meaning: it's being sold right now)
Wrong auxiliary for a process — 'is verkocht' means it's already sold (state). For the ongoing sale use 'wordt'.
✅ Het huis wordt verkocht.
The house is being sold.
❌ De ramen worden gewassen bij de schoonmaker.
Wrong preposition — the agent takes 'door', not 'bij'.
✅ De ramen worden gewassen door de schoonmaker.
The windows are being cleaned by the cleaner.
❌ De brief wordt geschreven door een pen.
Wrong — a tool/instrument takes 'met', and 'door' is for the human agent. A pen is an instrument: 'met een pen'.
✅ De brief wordt met een pen geschreven.
The letter is written with a pen.
❌ De brief wordt door de directeur geschreven worden.
Doubled auxiliary — one finite 'wordt' is enough in the present; no extra 'worden'.
✅ De brief wordt door de directeur geschreven.
The letter is being written by the director.
❌ Het rapport wordt ondertekend de directeur.
Word order — the agent and participle stay inside the bracket: 'wordt door de directeur ondertekend'.
✅ Het rapport wordt door de directeur ondertekend.
The report is being signed by the director.
Key Takeaways
- The dynamic (process) passive is worden
- past participle: De brief wordt geschreven = "the letter is being written".
- Think of worden as "to become": the subject is becoming affected — the action is in progress.
- The agent is marked with door ("by"); an instrument with met ("with"). The agent is often omitted.
- Dutch splits process (wordt verkocht, "is being sold") from resulting state (is verkocht, "is sold") — English collapses both into "is sold".
- The perfect of the passive drops worden and uses zijn
- participle (is verstuurd = "has been sent"); that lives on the zijn-passive page.
Now practice Dutch
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Start learning Dutch→Related Topics
- The Stative Passive with ZijnB2 — How zijn plus a past participle describes a resulting state — De deur is gesloten — why this differs from the worden process passive, and how the same 'is + participle' also serves as the perfect of the passive, doing triple duty.
- Worden vs Zijn: Process vs State PassiveB2 — A decision guide for the Dutch passive — worden + participle for the process passive (is being built, ongoing action) versus zijn + participle for the state passive (has been built, the finished result) — and why one English 'is built' splits into two Dutch sentences.
- The Impersonal Passive (Er wordt gedanst)B2 — Dutch can passivise intransitive activity verbs that have no object at all, using a dummy er to fill the empty subject slot: Er wordt gedanst ('there is dancing / people are dancing'). The construction names an activity without naming who does it, and it has no English equivalent — learn it as a fixed frame, er wordt + past participle.
- The Krijgen-Passive (Recipient Passive)C1 — Alongside the worden-passive, Dutch has a second passive built with krijgen ('to get') plus a past participle that promotes the recipient — the indirect object — to subject: Hij kreeg het boek aangeboden ('he was offered the book'). English does this only with a handful of give-type verbs; Dutch makes it a regular construction.
- The Verb Bracket (Tangconstructie)A2 — In a Dutch main clause the finite verb stays second while infinitives, participles, and separable particles are flung to the very end, sandwiching the sentence in a 'pincer' bracket.