irregular verb

A verb that does not follow the usual rules for verb forms. Also known as a strong verb.

Verbs in English are irregular if they don't have a conventional -ed ending (like asked or ended) in the past tense and/or past participle forms. Contrast with Regular Verb.

See also:

• Introduction to Irregular Verbs
• Principal Parts of Irregular Verbs


• Conjugal Conjugations
• Principal Parts of a Verb
• Replacive
• Suppletion
• Ten Quick Questions and Answers About Verbs and Verbals in English
• What Is the Difference Between a Weak Verb and a Strong Verb?

Exercises:

• Building an Essay With Irregular Verbs
• Editing Exercise: Correcting Problems With Irregular Verbs
• Exercise in Using the Correct Forms of Irregular Verbs
• Proofreading for Tense Errors

Examples & Observations:

• "Throughout my career I swam for form. Speed came as a result."
  (Johnny Weissmuller)



• "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
  (Albert Einstein)



• "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
  (Tom Stoppard)



• 180 Cussed Exceptions
  "At first glance irregular verbs would seem to have no reason to live. Why should language have forms that are just cussed exceptions to a rule? . . .
  
  "Irregular forms are just words. If our language faculty has a knack for memorizing words, it should have no inhibitions about memorizing past-tense forms at the same time. These are the verbs we call irregular, and they are a mere 180 additions to a mental lexicon that already numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands."
  (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules. Basic, 1999)



• The Origin of Irregular Verbs
  - "[I]rregular verbs . . . derive from the Old English period. At that time they were called strong and weak verbs respectively. Strong verbs formed their past tense and past participle with an ablaut or vowel gradation (a means of marking different functions of a word by varying the vowel sound in its base). Weak verbs formed their past tense and past participle with an inflectional suffix, that is, a {-d} or {-t} suffix. With the loss of inflections during the Middle English period, all new verbs took on the weak verb formation with an {-ed} or {-t} in past forms. This weak formation soon became the norm for what we now refer to as English regular verbs; strong verbs became irregular verbs."
  (Bernard O'Dwyer, Modern English Structures: Form, Function, And Position, 2nd ed. Broadview Press, 2006)
  
  
  - "In Old English there were over 300 [irregular verbs] (Baugh and Cable 1978), which fell into seven relatively clear-cut classes; in modern English there are roughly half that number, in classes which overlap and have deviant internal groups, and in addition, a number of weak verbs have joined the class of irregular verbs. The Comprehensive Grammar of English (1985) presents seven classes of irregular verbs, five of them with subgroups. The total membership of the modern irregular verb system is a question of criteria, depending on whether you include

  i) verbs which are conjugated both regularly and irregularly
  ii) verbs which are prefixed or compounded forms of monomorphemic irregular verbs
  iii) verbs which fall into the category of 'oldfashioned' or 'archaic' English

  To provide maximum help--and to avoid prejudging such issues--the Comprehensive Grammar (QGLS) presents a list of 267 irregular verbs, but it shrinks to about 150 if you apply all three criteria just mentioned."
  (Pam Peters, "American and British Influence in Australian Verb Morphology." Creating and Using English Language Corpora, ed. by Udo Fries, Gunnel Tottie, and Peter Schneider. Rodopi, 1994)



• The Lighter Side of Irregular Verbs
  "A boy who swims may say he swum,
  But milk is skimmed and seldom skum,
  And nails you trim; they are not trum.
  
  "When words you speak, these words are spoken,
  But a nose is tweaked and can't be twoken.
  And what you seek is seldom soken.
  
  "If we forget, then we've forgotten,
  But things we wet are never wotten,
  And houses let cannot be lotten.
  
  "The things one sells are always sold,
  But fog dispelled are not dispold,
  And what you smell is never smold.
  
  "When young, a top you oft saw spun,
  But did you see a grin ever grun,
  Or a potato neatly skun?"
  (anonymous, "Variable Verbs" or "Verbs Is Funny")