English irregular verbs
The short answer
English has around 180 irregular verbs, but roughly sixty carry almost all ordinary use. They fall into recognisable groups: all three forms the same, two the same, or vowel changes in a pattern, and learning them by group is far faster than learning an alphabetical list.
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The rule
An irregular verb does not form its past simple and past participle with -ed. English irregulars fall into a small number of shape groups rather than being random: some keep one form throughout, some share two of three, and many follow a vowel-change pattern that repeats across several verbs. Because the irregular verbs are also the most frequent verbs in the language, they are worth over-learning early, and because the rare tail is genuinely rare, learning the full list is a poor use of time.
| Form | Structure | Example |
|---|---|---|
| All three the same | no change at all | cut, cut, cut, put, let, hit |
| Past and participle the same | one change | buy, bought, bought |
| All three different | two changes | go, went, gone, see, saw, seen |
| i → a → u | a repeating vowel pattern | sing, sang, sung, begin, began, begun |
| -ought / -aught | shared ending | think, thought, brought, caught, taught |
| ow → ew → own | another pattern | know, knew, known, grow, grew, grown |
Part 1 of 3
Learn them in groups
Verbs with all three forms identical are the cheapest to learn and include several very common ones: cut, put, let, set, hit, cost, hurt, shut. Nothing changes, so there is nothing to confuse.
The largest group shares the past and the participle: buy/bought, bring/brought, teach/taught, catch/caught, think/thought, find/found, keep/kept, leave/left. Once you spot the shared ending, whole clusters come together at once.
It cost more than I thought.
Cost never changes; thought is shared.
She brought the documents and left.
Two verbs from the -ought/-eft groups.
They kept it quiet.
Keep → kept → kept.
Part 2 of 3
The three-form verbs
The verbs with three distinct forms are the ones that cause errors, because the participle is easy to swap for the past. Go/went/gone, see/saw/seen, do/did/done, take/took/taken, write/wrote/written, break/broke/broken.
The vowel-change patterns help. Sing/sang/sung, ring/rang/rung, swim/swam/swum and drink/drank/drunk all behave the same; so do know/knew/known, grow/grew/grown and throw/threw/thrown.
I’ve written to them twice.
Written, not wrote, the perfect takes the participle.
The glass broke when it fell.
Past simple, so broke.
Someone had taken my seat.
Taken, after had.
Part 3 of 3
Which ones to learn first
Frequency should decide the order. Be, have, do, go, say, get, make, know, think, take, see, come, want, use, find, give, tell, work, call, try, ask, need, feel, become, leave, put, mean, keep, let, begin, seem, help, show, hear, run, hold, bring, write, sit, stand, lose, pay, meet, set, learn, lead, understand, speak, read, spend.
That is most of the sixty. The remainder of a standard 180-verb list contains verbs like smite, cleave, forsake and abide, which you can read comfortably without ever producing.
I’ve read it, but I don’t understand it.
Read is spelled the same and pronounced /red/ in the past.
He paid and left.
Pay → paid, an almost-regular irregular.
We spent two hours on it.
Spend → spent → spent.
Mistakes to avoid
What learners actually get wrong
I have went to the bank.
I have been to the bank.
The perfect needs the participle, not the past simple. And with go, been rather than gone, because you came back, two rules in one short sentence.
I seen it yesterday.
I saw it yesterday.
Seen is the participle and needs an auxiliary. On its own the past simple is saw. This is widespread in some dialects and still marked wrong in standard English.
She has broke the screen.
She has broken the screen.
After has, the participle. Broke is the past simple, and the two are only one letter apart in several verbs, spoke and spoken, chose and chosen, which is why the group repays practice.
He teached me how to do it.
He taught me how to do it.
Over-regularising is a normal stage and disappears with exposure. Teach belongs to the -aught group alongside catch, so learning them together fixes both.
Now use it
Irregular verbs
Match each base form to its past simple and past participle. Reading a rule and being able to apply it are different skills, and only one of them shows up when you speak.
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Questions
Asked and answered
- Do I really need all 180?
- No. About sixty cover ordinary spoken and written English, and the tail contains verbs most native speakers rarely use. Learning the frequent ones thoroughly beats learning the full list superficially. You will meet the rare ones in reading, where recognition is enough.
- Are British and American forms different?
- For a handful, yes. British English allows learnt, dreamt, spelt and burnt where American English prefers learned, dreamed, spelled and burned. Got and gotten differ too: American English keeps gotten as a participle, British English does not.
- Why are the most common verbs the irregular ones?
- Because frequency protects them. Regular endings spread by analogy, and a verb used constantly is reinforced often enough to resist. That is why English has kept go/went and be/was while rarer verbs quietly regularised.