• 3-minute read
  • 14th August 2017

Vocabulary Tips: Irregular Verbs

While some verbs happily obey the ‘rules’ of grammar, irregular verbs do things their own way. They are the rebels of the grammar world.

Grammatical Guevaras, so to speak.

However, while we appreciate this rebellious attitude, irregular verbs are often misused. To avoid errors, you therefore need to know how they work.

Regular Verbs

Before we get to the rule-breakers, we should take a look at how regular verbs behave. Essentially, regular verbs follow a pattern when forming past tenses.

With simple past tense verbs and past participles, this usually means adding ‘-ed’ (e.g. rainrained). Other examples include:

Base Verb Form

Simple Past Tense

Past Participle

Jump

Jumped

Jumped

Dance

Danced

Danced

Imagine

Imagined

Imagined

Swallow

Swallowed

Swallowed

As you can see, with regular verbs, the simple past tense and past participle forms are the same.

Irregular Verbs

With irregular verbs, you cannot rely on any single pattern working all the time. Nor are the simple past tense and past participle forms always the same.

The verb ‘eat’, for example, becomes ‘ate’ in the simple past tense (not ‘eated’). Similarly, the past participle of ‘eat’ is ‘eaten’. Other examples include:

Base Verb Form

Simple Past Tense

Past Participle

Swim

Swam

Swum

Go

Went

Gone

Think

Thought

Thought

Begin

Began

Begun

As you can see, there is no regular pattern here; in some cases, such as ‘go’ and ‘went’, there is no obvious connection between different forms of the same verb at all!

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This can make spelling the past tense and past participle forms of irregular verbs difficult, especially since there are a lot of irregular verbs. Practice is the best way to avoid making errors, but you can always look up words if you’re not sure whether they have irregular past tense and past participle forms.

The Trickiness of ‘Be’

Finally, the verb ‘be’ deserves a special mention. Not only is it one of the most common verbs in English, it’s also one of the most irregular. We can see this if we look at some of its variations:

Variations of ‘Be’

First Person Singular/Plural

Second Person Singular/Plural

Third Person Singular/Plural

Infinitive

To be

To be

To be

Present Tense

Am/Are

Are

Is/Are

Past Tense

Was/Were

Were

Was/Were

Present Participle

Being

Being

Being

Past Participle

Been

Been

Been

Even this doesn’t cover all the situations in which ‘be’ plays by its own rules (we’ll save the subjunctive mood for another day). This can be confusing, but as long as you’re careful to proofread your work, you should avoid mistakes.

Comments (1)
Serah gitau
26th August 2017 at 03:21
I have learned a lot.I would like to improve my grammar and I sure you can help me alot.my future plans is to deliver the right information without different mean due to wrong using of grammar. I also would like to write a book.thankyou for your support




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