English Irregular Verbs

In English, to form past or perfect tense sentences in the affirmative, the verb must be conjugated with the appropriate ending. This means that verb conjugation (alongside any auxiliary verbs) indicates when the action takes place.

• I watch TV in the evenings. - I watch TV in the evenings. (Present Simple)
• I watched TV last night. - Last night, I watched TV. (Past Simple)
• I've watched enough TV. - I've watched enough TV. (Present Perfect)

In terms of verb tense, English verbs have three forms.

• V1: Base form or Infinitive (Base Form, Infinitive)
• V2: Past tense form (Past Tense)
• V3: Past participle or 3rd form (Past Participle, 3rd Form)

Most verbs are conjugated regularly.

• watch -> watched -> watched
• play -> played -> played
• walk -> walked -> walked

However, there are verbs (including very commonly used ones) that are conjugated irregularly. This simply means there's no rule like the -ed ending; instead, each verb is conjugated uniquely into its past tense or third form.

Of course, there's some logic to it. Specifically, there are certain patterns that some irregular verb conjugations follow.

Below, you can see a table of the most commonly used irregular verbs. There are also three mini-games to make learning easier. All you need to do is select the words you want to learn from the list, choose the difficulty level using the buttons below, then click on one of the three games below to start playing.

A good learning strategy is to group them based on similar patterns. For example, drink - drank - drunk and sing - sang - sung belong to the same group.