Introduction

Let’s look at these two sentences.

• She played well, but the fielder catched the ball.
• She prepared for the exam and teached her friends as well.

You can notice there is a mistake in both sentences.

We cannot use 'catched’ as the past form of 'catch’. And we cannot use 'teached’ as the past form of ‘teach’. The correct forms are 'caught’ and 'taught’.

But look at ‘play’ and ‘prepare’. We use ‘played’ and ‘prepared’.

Why is this difference? Why can’t we say ‘catched’ or ‘teached’ when we can use ‘played’ and ‘prepared?

This is a common mistake that many people make every day. That’s what we are going to explore here. But before we discuss the difference, let’s first try and understand some basics.

Three types of verbs

Verbs can be divided into three major categories:

1. Main Verbs: These are also known as full verbs or lexical verbs. Examples include eat, leave, play, and catch.

2. Primary Verbs: The primary verbs are be, have, and do. Examples include am, is, are, has, have, do, and did. These verbs are called "primary" because they can function both as auxiliary verbs and as main verbs.

   • An auxiliary verb (also known as a helping verb) is used with a main verb. For example:
     • I am playing hockey (Here, am is the auxiliary verb and playing is the main verb).
     • I have done my work (Here, have is the auxiliary verb and done is the main verb).
   • Primary verbs can also function as main verbs on their own. For example:
     • I am a teacher (Here, am is a main verb used alone, without another verb).

   So, primary verbs serve two purposes—they can act as both main verbs and auxiliary verbs. We’ll discuss auxiliary verbs in detail later.

3. Modal Auxiliary Verbs: Words like can, could, may, and should are modal auxiliary verbs. These verbs can only be used as auxiliary verbs, always in combination with a main verb to express mood, possibility, or necessity.

So, there are three main categories of verbs:

1. Main Verbs (also known as lexical verbs)
2. Primary Verbs (which function as both auxiliary and main verbs)
3. Modal Auxiliary Verbs

Among these three categories, only main verbs and primary verbs have the ability to change form, allowing them to convey additional information such as tense and voice.

Different forms of verbs

Here, we will focus on ‘how’ these verbs change. We’ll explore ‘why’ they change and ‘where’ we use them in future discussions.

Generally, verbs have four forms, which can be categorized into two main groups:

1. Base/Present Form (V1)
2. Past Form (V2)
3. Past Participle (V3)
4. Present Participle (V1ing)

Regular Verbs

Every main verb in English has these four forms. Let’s look at some examples:

• play – played – played – playing
• enjoy – enjoyed – enjoyed – enjoying
• watch – watched – watched – watching
• close – closed – closed – closing
• study – studied – studied – studying

When you observe how the verbs change, you’ll notice a pattern: we simply add ‘d’ or ‘ed’ at the end. Verbs that take ‘d’ or ‘ed’ at the end have the same past and past participle forms, and these verbs are called ‘Regular Verbs’.

Irregular Verbs

Now, let’s look at the second category. Consider these verbs:

• go – went – gone – going
• write – wrote – written – writing
• drink – drank – drunk – drinking
• send – sent – sent – sending
• build – built – built – building
• cut – cut – cut – cutting
• spread – spread – spread – spreading

As you can see, there is no consistent pattern in how these verbs change. These verbs are called Irregular Verbs. When using irregular verbs, remember not to make the mistake of adding ‘d’ or ‘ed’ to the base form.

Why do we have irregular verbs?

This brings us to our main question: How can we identify whether a verb is regular or irregular?

If we know that a verb is regular, we simply add ‘ed’ to form the past and past participle. There’s no need to worry about anything else. On the other hand, if we know that a verb is irregular, it has its own past and past participle forms that don’t follow the ‘ed’ pattern. How to identify?

To answer this question, we need to look back at the history of language. A long time ago, there were two main ways to form the past tense of a verb.

• The first method, which we’re all familiar with, involved adding ‘ed’ to the verb.
• The second method involved changing the vowel in the verb, like ‘write - wrote - written,’ ‘drink - drank - drunk,’ or ‘rise - rose - risen.’ However, not all irregular verbs follow this vowel-changing rule, and some don’t follow any consistent pattern at all!

Over time, people became more accustomed to the first method—the one with ‘ed’—and it became the more popular way to form the past tense. As a result, the second method gradually fell out of use.

So, you might be wondering, “Why do we still have a list of irregular verbs today?”

The answer is simple: Some verbs resisted the ‘ed’ change because they were frequently used in everyday speech. These common verbs held onto their original forms, and as a result, we ended up with a list of irregular verbs. Who knows? In the future, we might not even have these irregular forms, as in some parts of the world, people already use regular forms for verbs that were once irregular. For example, many people say “learnt” and “learned,” “dreamed” and “dreamt,” “spilled” and “spilt,” or “spoiled” and “spoilt.”

The key point here is that irregular verbs don’t follow any specific rules, and they come from Old English. Fortunately, it’s a relatively small list—around 250 irregular verbs in total, according to some grammar books. So, we should simply memorize them. There's no shortcut!

Once you’ve learnt these irregular verbs, you can consider all the other verbs in English to be regular and you can simply have ‘ed’ at the end. It’s not difficult to memorise them because many verbs only change with prefixes.

Take, for example, the verb ‘take’—its past form is ‘took’, and the past participle is ‘taken’.

Now, consider these verbs: ‘undertake’, ‘overtake’, and ‘mistake’. They only differ by prefixes, but the conjugation follows the same pattern as ‘take’:

• undertake – undertook – undertaken
• overtake – overtook – overtaken
• mistake – mistook – mistaken

There’s no need to memorize these verbs separately—they follow the same changes as ‘take’.

New verbs, regular or irregular?

As I’ve mentioned earlier, this list of irregular verbs originates from Old English, and it’s unlikely to change as long as the English language exists. When I say “not changing,” I mean no new verbs will be added to the list. Any new verbs, whether coined or borrowed, will follow the regular pattern of adding ‘ed’ at the end, thus categorizing them as regular verbs. Here are some real-time examples:

• google – googled – googled
• tweet – tweeted – tweeted

Elon Musk has rebranded Twitter as X now. Would we say ‘xed’ or ‘x’d’.? I don’t know! But ‘retweeted’ has become ‘reposted’.

Now that you understand why irregular verbs exist and how to handle them, here's the good news: if you start today, you can learn all the irregular verbs in English within a week or two—especially since you might already know many of them! Once you've learnt the irregular verbs, you’ll never again make the mistake of adding ‘ed’ to them, and you’ll have complete confidence with them for the rest of your life.