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Irregular verbs: What are they and how to use them
Unlike regular verbs, irregular verbs don't follow the familiar pattern for forming tenses and past participles. Instead of adding ‘-ed’ to create the past tense and past participle, irregular verbs have their own distinctive forms for each tense!
This makes learning irregular verbs a bit of a challenge as there's no set formula for students to rely on. To master them, students must instead commit each irregular verb and its special verb forms to memory.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the difference between regular and irregular verbs, as well as the most common verbs you’re likely to encounter when learning the english language.
What are irregular verbs
Let’s start with the definition: what’s an irregular verb?
Simply put, irregular verbs are verbs that ‘don’t play by the rules’. While regular verbs follow the standard grammar rules of modern English in adding ‘-ed’ or ‘-d’ to form the past tense and past participle forms, irregular verbs use completely original words for their different verb forms when they’re the main verb of a sentence.
Here are a few examples to highlight the difference.
| Verb | Simple Present | Simple Past | Past Participle |
| Dance (Regular) Sing (Irregular) |
Susan loves to dance and sing. | Susan danced and sang all night long. | Susan had danced and sung beautifully at the recital last night. |
| Jog (Regular) | Joanne jogs by the lake every morning. | Joanne jogged by the lake this morning. | Joanna has jogged by the lake this morning. |
| Eat (Irregular) | Simon eats broccoli regularly for dinner. | Simon ate broccoli for dinner last night. | Simon had eaten broccoli for dinner three nights in a |
As shown in the examples above, we can clearly see that while adding a ‘-ed’ or ‘-d’ to the back of a regular verb forms a past and past participle tense, the same rule just doesn’t work with irregular verbs such as sing or eat.
Strong vs weak verbs
One of the most common mistakes often made by students is confusing irregular and regular verbs with strong and weak verbs.
Strong verbs are those that alter their vowel sounds when forming the past tense. Take ‘swim’ for example, the i changes to an a in the past tense of the verb. In contrast, weak verbs maintain the same vowel sound in the past tense. As seen in ‘dance’, the vowel ‘a’ remains the same.
Considering these rules, it becomes clear to us that all strong verbs are irregular. However, the confusion often lies with weak verbs because some of them also fall into the irregular category. Some of the most common examples of irregular weak verbs are ‘keep’, ‘sleep’, ‘leap’, and so on.
List of common regular verbs
Here is a list of the 20 most common regular verbs you'll encounter.
| Simple Present | Simple Past | Past Participle |
| Play | Played | Played |
| Work | Worked | Worked |
| Live | Lived | Lived |
| Need | Needed | Needed |
| Try | Tried | Tried |
| Call | Called | Called |
| Help | Helped | Helped |
| Want | Wanted | Wanted |
| Jump | Jumped | Jumped |
| Like | Liked | Liked |
| Ask | Asked | Asked |
| Clean | Cleaned | Cleaned |
| Open | Opened | Opened |
| Close | Closed | Closed |
| Start | Started | Started |
| Love | Loved | Loved |
| Talk | Talked | Talked |
| Visit | Visited | Visited |
| Watch | Watched | Watched |
| Dance | Danced | Danced |
List of common irregular verbs
| Simple Present | Simple Past | Past Participle |
| Go | Went | Gone |
| Be | Was/were | Been |
| Have | Had | Had |
| Do | Did | Done |
| Say | Said | Said |
| Get | Got | Got |
| Make | Made | Made |
| See | Saw | Seen |
| Come | Came | Come |
| Take | Took | Taken |
| Give | Gave | Given |
| Find | Found | Found |
| Tell | Told | Told |
| Keep | Kept | Kept |
| Hear | Heard | Heard |
| Leave | Left | Left |
| Feel | Felt | Felt |
| Hold | Held | Held |
| Think | Thought | Thought |
| Run | Ran | Run |
