Tense Tables gave four rules that build every regular verb, and on the regular verbs the rules were right more than 99 times in 100. The irregular verbs were set aside before that score was taken, because no rule makes their past: bring does not become bringed. This course is about them. The lab holds 133, printed with their three forms; 132 of them sort into six classes by a rule a computer can check, and be stands outside. The list is short, but it is made of the words you say most.
Core ideas
Three ideas, and the last one explains the other two.
Tense Tables showed that adding -ed gives the past of almost every regular verb. A verb is irregular when that rule gives the wrong answer. Bring becomes brought, and nothing in the spelling of bring tells you so.
The lab holds 133 verbs. 132 of them fall into six classes, the largest with 60, and be stands outside the classes. Pinker, who has written about this at length, puts the whole list at about 180. A list of 180 is a small thing to learn next to a language of many thousands of verbs.
The idea, which Pinker has argued, is that a word you hear all the time is held in memory whole. It never needs the rule, so the rule never takes it over. A rare word has to be built each time, and a build soon settles on the regular rule. That is why the odd verbs are the common ones.
The material
The four steps above, on a regular verb, on a verb with one odd form, and on a verb with two.
Tense Tables ended with a score. Four rules build the five forms of any regular verb, and on the 1,210 regular verbs of the word list they were right 99.92%, 99.34% and 99.26% of the time. The few they missed were regular verbs with a spelling twist, such as panic and panicking. But before that score was taken, a set of verbs was put aside, because no rule builds their past at all. This course is that set.
Every verb has a base form, a past, and a form used after have. The last of these is called the participle. For walk the past and the participle are both walked, and the -ed rule builds them.
A verb is irregular when that rule gives the wrong answer for the past, the participle, or both. Bring, brought, brought. Know, knew, known. No rule from Tense Tables makes these, and you cannot work them out from the base.
The lab holds 133 verbs, printed with their three forms. 132 of them fall into six classes, and the biggest class has 60; the tile that counts the classes reads 6, because be stands outside them all. The next lesson shows how the classes are defined.
The wider figure is Pinker’s: about 180 irregular verbs in all. A list of 183 was put together for this course, and that is close to his number. It is a count that depends on where you draw the line, so read it as a size and not as an exact total.
When this course was built, the 183 verbs were checked against a list of the 2,809 most common words in English. 132 of them were in it, which is 72.1%. The 51 that were not include weep, flee, creep, shed and forgive. That check was made once, and it is quoted here: the page does not carry the 183, so it cannot redo it. The lab holds 133, one more than the 132, because the list was settled by hand after the check; every one of the 133 is in the common list.
Look at the kept verbs by rank in that common list. The middle verb is at rank 697.5, so half of them sit among the 700 commonest words, and 44% are in the top 500. These two figures are quoted too: the page carries each word’s band, not its rank. The irregular verbs gather at the frequent end.
This is an observation more than a proof, and it is Pinker’s, not something measured here. A word that you meet thousands of times is stored in memory whole. It never has to be built, so the regular rule never gets the chance to replace it. Frequency keeps a verb irregular.
A rare verb works the other way. You meet it too rarely to store its past, so you build the past each time, and what you build is the regular one. Over many years, rare irregular verbs tend to move toward -ed. The common ones stay as they are.
The word list check shows that irregular verbs are common. It does not show why. The idea of memory is a good reason, and other reasons may also play a part. Treat it as the best account available, and do not lean on it too hard.
The rest of this course puts numbers on the list. Next comes its shape, six classes with a rule each. After that comes the question of how much of a real page these verbs fill, and there the first number you see turns out to need a fix.
Interactive
133 verbs, and the class the sorting questions put each one in
| base | past | after have | class |
|---|
Method
To find out whether a verb is irregular, do this.
The base, the past, and the form used after have. These three are enough. The other two forms, the -s form and the -ing form, follow the rules from that course for every irregular verb but two: have makes has, and be has am, is, are and being.
Add -ed, with the small changes that course listed. This is your guess.
If they match, the verb is regular. If they do not, the verb is irregular, and the difference is what you have to learn.
Check the third form on its own. For show the past is regular, showed, but the form after have is shown. One wrong form is enough.
For each verb the guess is the base plus -ed, used for both the past and the form after have. Beside it is what people write.
Walk passes both steps. Show passes the past and fails the form after have, and one failure is enough, so it is on the list. Bring fails both. The test never asks how a verb sounds or how common it is; it compares two spellings, which is what lets the lab print the list without a judgement in it.
The lab shows the written forms for all 133. Pick any row, build the guess yourself, and you will find the row is there because the guess is wrong.
You should be able to run the four-step test on any verb and say regular or irregular, name the three forms that matter, say how many irregular verbs there are and where that figure comes from, and explain why a verb you use every day is far more likely to be irregular than one you rarely meet.
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