
For a basic conversation with an English speaker, it is enough to learn about 80 of the most commonly used irregular verbs. It is therefore a good idea to learn them by heart.įortunately, we don't have to know them all. In contrast, irregular verbs in English are formed differently - irregularly.

So in practice, a regular verb will be formed as follows: This is then the same for the past tense and the past participle. Therefore, in Europe we pay much more attention to learning irregular verbs than, for example, in America.Įach verb (either regular or irregular) has three basic forms:įor regular verbs it is enough to add an ending to the end of the verb - ed. In contrast, in British English, regular verbs make up only 65% of all verbs. In American English, regular verbs make up about 90% of all verbs. However, this is not the case with newly formed words composed of multiple verbs ( housesit/housesite/housesitten). Newly formed words usually form both the past tense and the past participle regularly - so their shape does not change ( cut/cut/cut). Interestingly, Old English verbs usually have an irregular form in both the past tense and the past participle. In most cases, the irregular verb form is found in the past tense (past simple) and past participle. Where is the irregular verb form most often found? The rest are used mainly in technical literature or in Old English. All in all, that's almost 500 verbs that we should know and memorize.įortunately, we only encounter about 200 irregular verbs in ordinary English conversation. And this is doubly true if we add the prefix forms of the verbs. There are a lot of irregular verbs in English - about 280. Irregular verbs are no different in their basic form from regular verbs. This means that we can't add the ending -ed to create their irregular form, which would represent the past tense form, just like regular verbs. Irregular verbs are verbs in English that do not have their regular form for the past tense and past participle. There are irregular verbs also in other languages, such as German (DE), Spanish (ES) and others, which we’re not going to cover here. However, there are some connections that you can use to your advantage when you study. See all the irregular verbs exercises here.English has dozens of irregular verbs that you have to learn by heart. If you are more advanced, download this much longer list, which includes most of the crazy verbs in English. This is a good place to start if you are intermediate or beginner level. Here is a list of fifty of the most common irregular verbs, with exercises below. This video shows you how to pronounce 50 of the most common ones (see the list below): How confident are you about English irregular verbs?
