Understanding and using irregular verbs

What is an irregular verb?

The definition of an irregular verb is a verb that changes spelling in any of its past or present tenses. It won’t follow the normal conjugation pattern for verbs—or put simply, adding -ed or -d to the end of its present tense form won’t help you. Quick, did you catch the irregular verb used up above? The past tense form of “to catch” isn’t, simply “catched.” It’s an entirely unpredictable new spelling, “caught.”

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You’re likely to encounter irregular verbs quite a bit—the top 10 English verbs are all irregular and considering that list includes “to be” and “to go,” they’re ones you’ll be encountering a bunch.¹ Overall, there are a little less than 200 irregular verbs, but they tend to be more common than many other verbs. You can blame our tendency to mix and acquire other languages for that.

How can I keep my irregular verbs straight?

Unfortunately, there’s not much to prepare for the possibility of a verb being irregular. Your best bet is to memorize and grammar check—but the good news is that you will likely encounter irregular verbs all the time, so you have plenty of opportunity to learn them! Paying attention to what you read and what you hear can help you pick up on the differences in spelling and usage between past and present verb tenses and may help you figure out how different forms of a certain irregular verb are related to each other. If you’re a native English speaker, you are likely doing this without even realizing it. But if you’ve ever learned another language, you probably remember committing several different irregular verbs and their various irregular forms to memory. English-language learners will have a similar learning curve when it comes to our vast verbiage.

If this is at all helpful to you, the irregular English verbs can be made more regular if you divide them into four distinct categories.² Before you dive in, know that a participle is a word formed from a verb which can be used as a noun or adjective, and is more importantly used to construct verb tenses.

• Verbs which have the same base form, past simple and past participle. An example is “put.” You can put things on the table in the past or present and the verb put doesn’t change.
• Verbs which have the same past simple and past participle. For example, “have.” You can “have” something in the present, but you “had” it in the past.
• Verbs which have the same base form and past participle. There aren’t as many of this kind as the first two, but they’re still quite important. An example is run—you can “run” a race today or tomorrow, but you “ran” a race yesterday, and have “run” many races in the past.
• Verbs which have a different base form, past simple and past participle. Be prepared for nothing to make sense anymore—this is the category of “to be” turning into “is,” “are,” and “were,” among many others.

The more you use irregular verbs, the less irregular they’ll feel. Soon, you might not even notice their irregularity at all. And perhaps that’s a goal to strive toward—in both the present and the future.

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