Irregular Verbs

Regular verbs form the simple past tense and the past participle by adding a suffixA group of letters placed at the end of a word which changes the meaning or grammatical form of that word. (e.g. -ed)Or similar suffixes depending on the form of the base verb to the base form of the verb. Irregular verbs do not follow this pattern and so the forms of their past tense and past participle need to be learnt. Unfortunately, many of these verbs are very common; it helps to master these as soon as possible.

Here is a complete table of English irregular verbs for your reference.

This list is searchable and sortable on larger devices.

You can sort this table by the Base Form (alphabetically), CEFRThe Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is a tool for describing language ability on a 7 point scale., Frequency and Class by clicking on those headings in the table. Re-clicking on a heading reverses the order. The CEFR levels range from A1 (the lowest level) to C2 (the highest level). Be aware that verbs can have many different meanings so the CEFR ranking given here is for the most common usage (the lowest level). Frequency means how often these words appear in text. This is based on the British National CorpusSee the Adam Kilgarrif frequency lists.. "1" means the word appears in the most frequent 1000 words in English; "2" means the word appears in the second most frequent 1000 words, and so on. Class is a classification based on pronunciation given in (Quirk 1985). Re-clicking on a heading reverses the order. You can also use the search bar to find individual words.

You can see examples of the use of most of these verbs in authentic texts by mousing over the verbs, and you can practise them by using the irregular verb flashcardsGo to the Irregular Verb Flashcards Page. and the irregular verb exercise pageGo to the Irregular Verb Exercise page.. Clicking on the verb links takes you to the articles where these examples were found. Scroll down to see the full table.