Most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation systems. There are a few exceptions, however, such as the verb catch (derived from Old Northern French cachier), whose irregular forms originated by way of analogy with native verbs such as teach. Nearly all verbs that have been borrowed into the language at a later stage have defaulted to the regular conjugation. Most English irregular verbs are native, derived from verbs that existed in Old English. įor information on the conjugation of regular verbs in English, as well as other points concerning verb usage, see English verbs. Nonetheless, there are also many irregular verbs that follow or partially follow the weak conjugation. The regular verbs, on the other hand, with their preterites and past participles ending in -ed, follow the weak conjugation, which originally involved adding a dental consonant ( -t or -d). In particular, many such verbs derive from Germanic strong verbs, which make many of their inflected forms through vowel gradation, as can be observed in Modern English patterns such as sing–sang–sung. Irregular verbs in Modern English are typically derived from verbs that followed more regular patterns at a previous stage in the history of the language. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit, from sit). The irregular verbs include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. There are a few exceptions: the verb be has irregular forms throughout the present tense the verbs have, do, and say have irregular -s forms and certain defective verbs (such as the modal auxiliaries) lack most inflection. The other inflected parts of the verb-the third person singular present indicative in -s, and the present participle and gerund form in -ing-are formed regularly in most cases.

In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense (also called preterite) or the past participle. The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use-and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted.

Sing past tense form