The Pu'al Forms You Really Do Meet

You have been using pu'al since roughly your third week of Hebrew, without being told. This page is the short, honest list of what you actually encounter, sorted not by paradigm but by where you encounter it — because the answer is very different for the participle than for the finite verb.

Nine participles you already know as words

These arrive as vocabulary. Nobody learns מיוחד as "having been set apart"; they learn it as special. All nine are pu'al participles, all nine are drifting or fully drifted into plain adjectives, and the counts in the last column are how many Hebrew Wikipedia articles contain the exact string (August 2026) — a written corpus, not speech.

Nine rows, six of them on one vowel skeleton: me-u-á. The other three break it, in two different ways.

מפורט breaks it in the middle: ר refuses a dagesh, so the vowel lengthens to a cholam and the word is meforát. Which letters do that is tabled on pu'al present; what matters here is that it splits two of the commonest words in the language. מיוחד is meyukhád, kubuts intact, because ח behaves differently — while מיועד "intended for", one letter away, is meyo'ád with the lengthened vowel, because ע does not. In ktiv male neither difference is visible: a kubuts and a cholam are both a vav.

מרוצה and מנוסה break it at the end, for an unrelated reason: their roots close in ה, so the masculine ends in -é — merutsé, menusé. Their feminines are merutsá and menusá, and the spelling does not change: מרוצה is both.

Six finite verbs you meet in reading and listening

These are a different animal. You will barely produce them in conversation — Israelis reach for the agentless third-person plural instead — but you will meet them constantly in news, notices, minutes and email from institutions. The right way to learn them is with all three columns at once: what you read, what the active is, and what you would actually say.

Six rows, and their written-corpus weights are wildly uneven: פורסם appears in 19,078 Hebrew Wikipedia articles, תורגם in 6,788 and בוטל in 5,385, while שולם manages 511 and סודר 445. (אושר cannot be counted this way at all — the same five letters spell the noun אֹשֶׁר ósher "happiness", so its 7,528 articles are two words at once.) That spread is not random: an encyclopedia talks constantly about things being published and translated and rarely about the bill being settled.

Three pu'al forms in one bulletin

Here is the register in one piece. This is what a radio headline or a news-site strapline sounds like; nobody talks this way over dinner.

Three pu'al forms across the two sentences — אושרה, בוטל, יפורסם — and not one of them would survive a rewrite into speech, where you would get אישרו, ביטלו and יפרסמו. The register itself is worked through on newspaper style.

מדובר ב־, which the dictionaries only half-cover

If you read Hebrew news for an hour you will meet מדובר ב־ repeatedly: it's a matter of…, what we have here is…, this is a case of…. Formally it is a מְקֻטָּל form of ד־ב־ר, and both dictionaries do carry the word: Milog as "much-discussed" and as "spoken (language)", ויקימילון as an adjective glossed "that is spoken in" and "that was mentioned earlier", with attributive examples like הסכום המדובר. Neither gives the impersonal מדובר ב־ an entry of its own. So treat it as an attested usage picked up from reading, not as a dictionary item.

The evidence for it is straightforward. A regex search of Hebrew Wikipedia returns 20,844 articles containing מדובר ב־ against 1,165 for מדובר על — so ב־ is the preposition to learn, though על is genuinely used too and is not an error. The fused form כשמדובר "when it comes to" returns 581.

Every one of these writes its u with a vav

The classical pointing puts a kubuts under the letter and writes no vav — מְסֻדָּר, פֻּרְסַם, תֻּרְגַּם, בּוּטַּל, מְפוֹרָט — and that is what reference grammars print. Modern spelling writes the vav: מסודר, פורסם, תורגם, בוטל, מפורט. Copying the pointed form letter-for-letter is the fastest way to write an active verb by accident.

Common Mistakes

1. Dropping the vav. Without it you have written the pi'el active, and the sentence changes sides.

2. Using the pi'el participle to say how you feel. מבלבל and מבולבל are one letter apart and opposite in voice: the first is what the instructions do, the second is what they do to you.

3. Using the participle for a finished event. מתורגם is a present tense; a thing that was translated last year needs the past.

4. Assembling an infinitive. pu'al has none at all, and English has to be cancelled asks for one directly. Hebrew makes you choose a different verb instead.

Key Takeaways

• Pu'al reaches you in two separate deliveries: participles as everyday vocabulary, finite verbs as reading.
• The nine participles worth owning: מיוחד, מפורט, מפורסם, מרוצה, מסודר, מרוכז, מנוסה, מסובך, מבולבל.
• מפורט is meforát and מיועד is meyo'ád — ר and ע take no dagesh, so the vowel lengthens. מיוחד keeps its kubuts, meyukhád, because ח does not trigger it.
• מרוצה and מנוסה end in -é (ל״ה roots); their feminines merutsá, menusá are spelled identically.
• מחונן is two words: מְחוֹנָן "gifted" and מְחוּנָּן, the pu'al participle. The gifted-programme word is the first.
• Six finite forms carry most of what you will read: פורסם, אושר, תורגם, בוטל, שולם, סודר — each with a pi'el active behind it and an impersonal plural you would actually say.
• אושר is a homograph of אֹשֶׁר "happiness", so no corpus count of that string means anything on its own.
• מדובר ב־ is common and has no dictionary entry of its own — Milog and ויקימילון both cover only the attributive adjective. 20,844 Hebrew Wikipedia articles against 1,165 for מדובר על.
• The finite forms are written register. In speech the same fact comes out as פרסמו, אישרו, ביטלו.
• Ktiv male writes the u with a vav — מסודר, פורסם, תורגם, בוטל, מפורט — even though the reference pointing does not.