English irregular verbs > Divid verbs to logical groups
Divid verbs to logical groups
I have identified the following groups of irregular English verbs as having some form of shared root-vowel inflection. Although they are not officially recognized, I refer to them here as conjugations:
- Verbs with vowel shortening: creep, flee, hear, keep, leap, shoe, sleep, sweep and weep.
- Verbs with vowel shortening and devoicing of the ending: deal, dream, feel, kneel, lean, leave, lose and mean.
- Verbs with coalescence of consonants: bet, bid, cast, cost, cut, fit, hit, hurt, knit, put, quit, rid, set, shed, shut, split, spread, thrust, wed and wet.
- Verbs with coalescence of consonants and devoicing of the ending: bend, build, lend, rend, send, spend.
- Verbs with coalescence of consonants and vowel shortening: bleed, breed, feed, lead, light, meet, read and speed.
- Verbs with devoicing of the ending and no other irregularity: burn, dwell, learn, smell, spell, spill and spoil.
- Verbs continuing the Rückumlaut pattern: bring, buy, catch, seek, sell, teach, tell, and think.
- Verbs with additional contractions and shortenings: have, make, say.
- Verbs irregular only in spelling: lay, pay.
- The modal verbs: can, could, may, might, must, shall, will, should, would, ought.
- Two verbs (be and go) that contain suppletive forms: be, go
- The verb do, which has the reduplicated form did for its past tense: do
To find the correct form, you can use an online database of the irregular verbs.
For example: irregular verb TAKE