Earnt is a word I have tried playing myself, smaug, more than once. But when I investigated, I concluded it wasn't a real word. The
Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage (2008) says:
earn has a past and past participle form earned (They earned £200 a week / earned income), although earnt is found from time to time in newspapers, reflecting its pronunciation and by analogy with learnt
The same book also says elsewhere that, "
earnt is not standard, but is increasingly found".
This doesn't quite square with the idea that it is an archaic form, as suggested by some of the contributors in the link RM supplied. And indeed, one of the posts there noted that
earnt is not mentioned in the
OED, which would seem to rule out any regular use of it at any period in the history of the language. (And note that the Dickens quote is from a magazine he edited, not from one of his novels.)
On the other hand,
Wiktionary lists it, labeled "British, rare", and with the following usage note:
This is an uncommon (<0.5% as common as earned in the British National Corpus) but entirely acceptable alternative form of the simple past and past participle earned. Still considered to be incorrect by many, who are largely unaware of the historical development of the English language. Other verbs which can be declined in this way are: learn (learnt), dream (dreamt), spell (spelt).
Wiktionary is compiled by volunteers, so its judgements don't carry as much weight for me as Fowler's Usage Guide. (It was at the foot of a list of verbs with -t and -ed endings that this work singled out
earnt as not standard.)
So, it seems to me that
earnt is a variant form that is coming into wider use in some circles, rather than an old form that is still in occasional use. It is still not accepted as part of standard English by dictionaries, so I would recommend against any forumites using it in their Nobel Prize acceptance speeches, but it does seem to be used quite frequently in professionally edited publications, such as British and Australian newspapers and some books, especially non-fiction.
The
Times Online Style Guide prohibits the word:
past tense of verbs almost always prefer the shorter form using final -t where appropriate; eg, spelt not spelled, dreamt not dreamed (though NEVER earnt for earned)
However
earnt does appear about 134 times in the Times Online index, including
an example as recently as two days ago ("...the company earnt £4.1 million in the year ending March.")
I could find no examples in the books at Project Gutenberg, but there were numerous hits in Google Book Search.
With the level of usage it now has, I suspect that
earnt will eventually find its way into the dictionaries as an alternate form of
earned. But in any case, it does seem to have become part of the language used by quite a few writers, and I think we should accept it as a rare word.
