Irregular Verbs


Everyone has trouble with English irregular verbs. Small children make mistakes with them. Language students struggle with their strange endings. Some change completely. Why does 'go' become ‘went’ ?

Some verb endings are the same in the past and present. The book you read today is the same as the one you read yesterday.

Why?

Irregular verbs seem illogical. So why are they so important in English?

The psychologist, Steven Pinker, has an interesting theory. He says that irregular verbs are ‘fossils’ of an Indo-European pre-historic language.

The Indo-Europeans wandered across Europe and southwest Asia. They spoke language with a regular rule in which one vowel replaced another. But over time pronunciation changed. The ‘rules became opaque to children and eventually died; the irregular past tense forms are their fossils.’

How many ‘fossils’ survive?

There are now around 180 irregular verbs in English. That may sound a lot –but there are thousands of regular verbs. Interestingly, irregular verbs are more popular than regular ones.

  • 70% of all the verbs we use
  • The ten verbs we use most are all irregular: be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get.
  • The most infrequent verbs are all regular

Learning irregular endings

We need to work hard to memorise an irregular verb. It takes children years to learn that the past of speak is not speaked. Some never learn that there is nobody ever ‘writ’ anything. All the common native speaker mistakes – we was, they done etc – involve irregular verbs.

And yet children have a remarkable capacity to memorise new words. They learn new one every two hours and know an average 60,000 by the age of hh13.

That doesn’t mean that they have to use more than one at a time, of course (Question: ‘What did you do today? Answer: ‘Nothing.’)

The Future for Irregular Verbs

Do you know the words we use to describe he English language. Try this crossword. You can find all the words in the glossary of this section of ESL Reading.