Rode is the past tense of the verb ride, which means to sit on and travel using an animal or vehicle. When you rode your bike to school yesterday, you were sitting on it and moving it forward. When someone rode a horse across a field last weekend, they sat in the saddle while the horse carried them.

The word shows up in countless situations. You might have ridden the bus to the museum, ridden an elevator to the top floor, or ridden the Ferris wheel at the county fair. A cowboy in the Old West rode from town to town on horseback. Your grandparents might tell stories about how they rode their bikes everywhere as kids, since their parents didn't drive them around as much.

Remember: ride is what you do today (“I ride my scooter”), rode is what you did in the past (“I rode my scooter yesterday”), and ridden is what you use with helping verbs (“I have ridden my scooter many times”).

People sometimes confuse rode with road, the paved surface you travel on, but they're completely different words with different meanings and spellings.