The פָּעוּל Passive Participle (כתוב, סגור, ידוע)

Alongside its four tenses, pa'al has a fifth form built straight from the root on the pattern פָּעוּל: כָּתוּב written, סָגוּר closed, שָׁבוּר broken. It is a passive participle, and the most useful thing to know about it is what it is not — it is not a tense, and it does not report an event. It names the state something is in because of an event, and it behaves in every respect like an adjective.

Four forms, like any adjective

No prefix, no person, no tense — just the root with an a and a shuruk, and the ordinary adjective endings. Here is enough of the class to make the shape recognisable on sight:

Two details of the vowels. A guttural first letter cannot take the plain shva of the feminine, so it takes a chataf instead — and unlike a shva, a chataf is pronounced: עֲסוּקָה asuká and אֲסוּרָה asurá keep that first vowel, where סְגוּרָה sgurá simply drops it. And a final ח or ע pulls in a furtive patach, so פָּתוּחַ is patúakh and יָדוּעַ is yadúa, exactly as on ל״ע and ל״ח verbs.

The ל״ה variant ends in ־וּי

Roots whose third letter is a weak ה cannot end in a consonant, so they close the form with a yod: the pattern comes out ־וּי.

A root ending in א keeps the א and gives ־וּאָה in the feminine: נָשׂוּי nasúy "married" has the feminine נְשׂוּאָה nesu'á, not נשוייה. מָצוּי in the table above looks like a counterexample and is really a defection: it began on מצא, but the dictionaries now file it on a ל״ה root and inflect it accordingly — feminine מְצוּיָה, never מצואה.

Three sentences English says with one

This is the spine of the page. English the door was closed is ambiguous between a state and an event, and Hebrew has separate machinery for each, plus a third option for naming who did it.

The same three, on a second root, so the pattern rather than the words stays with you: הַחַלּוֹן שָׁבוּר (state) · הַחַלּוֹן נִשְׁבַּר (event) · שָׁבְרוּ אֶת הַחַלּוֹן (someone broke it).

Naming who did it

Because פעול describes a state, an agent phrase usually has nowhere to attach. English the door was closed by Danny is an event with a doer, and the ordinary Hebrew for it is the plain active: דני סגר את הדלת. Formal and journalistic writing can keep the patient in front by using the nif'al with על ידי — הדלת נסגרה על ידי דני — but the state form does not take the phrase.

The honest qualification, because you will meet counterexamples: one small set of participles — the ones describing documents — does combine with על ידי in legal and administrative Hebrew, where the state genuinely implies a named signatory. חתום על ידי is standard in contracts, and the numbers say it is not marginal: a full-text search of Hebrew Wikipedia returns it around 125 times against 262 for the event verb נחתם על ידי, the same order of magnitude.

Try the pattern on any other participle and it collapses. כתוב על ידי returns three hits, against nearly seven thousand for נכתב על ידי; בנוי על ידי eight, against a thousand for נבנה על ידי. That gap is the whole point: this is a lexical pocket belonging to a handful of words, not a licence to say הדלת סגורה על ידי דני.

The full decision procedure between active, nif'al, pu'al and the participle is on choosing a passive.

When the participle stops being a verb

Many of these forms drifted away from their verbs centuries ago, and their modern sense is not derivable from the root. A dictionary organised by root hides this, because it lists them under the verb they no longer mean.

• עָסוּק is not "dealt with" but simply busy — אני עסוק is the everyday way to decline an invitation.
• מָצוּי is not "found" but common, widespread — טעות מצויה, "a common mistake".
• אָסוּר has become an impersonal predicate: אסור לעשן כאן is "smoking is not allowed here", with no bound thing anywhere in it.
• יָדוּעַ has both senses side by side — "known" and "famous".

Common Mistakes

1. Leaving the participle unagreed. It is an adjective, so it agrees in gender and number with what it describes — every time, without exception.

2. Treating אסור as invariable. Learners meet it first in signs — אסור לעשן, אסור לחנות — where it is impersonal and never changes. With an actual subject it agrees like any other adjective.

3. Using the state form for a datable event. Both sentences below are correct; only one of them can be given a year.

4. Reaching for פעול to translate an English passive. English was written, was closed, was broken map onto the nif'al far more often than onto the participle, because English uses that shape for events.

Key Takeaways

• פָּעוּל is pa'al's passive participle and inflects like an adjective in four forms: כָּתוּב · כְּתוּבָה · כְּתוּבִים · כְּתוּבוֹת.
• It is not a tense. It names the state that an event left behind, and it carries no time reference of its own.
• ל״ה roots take the ־וּי variant — בָּנוּי, עָשׂוּי, קָנוּי, רָצוּי — and ל״א roots give a feminine in ־וּאָה (נָשׂוּי → נְשׂוּאָה).
• Learn the three-way contrast on one root and it transfers: הדלת סגורה (state) · הדלת נסגרה (event) · סגרו את הדלת (agent).
• An agent phrase does not attach to a state. Use the active (דני סגר את הדלת), or the nif'al with על ידי in formal writing. The exception is a small documentary set — חתום על ידי is standard legal Hebrew — and it does not generalise: כתוב על ידי is vanishingly rare beside נכתב על ידי.
• Several of these forms have hardened into ordinary adjectives whose sense no longer follows from the verb: עָסוּק busy, מָצוּי common, אָסוּר forbidden.
• In ktiv male the masculine singular and the imperative are spelled alike — סגור, כתוב, שמור — and only context separates them.