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English irregular verbs are now a closed group, which means that newly formed verbs are always regular and do not adopt any of the irregular patterns. This list only contains verb forms which are listed in the major dictionaries as being standard usage in modern English. There are also many thousands of archaic, non-standard and dialect variants.
The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero. [1]: 77 The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a dummy. This placeholder has ...
For example, before the Great Vowel Shift, the verb keep (then pronounced /keːp/, slightly like "cap", or "cape" without the / j / glide) belonged to a group of verbs whose vowel was shortened in the past tense; this pattern is preserved in the modern past tense kept (similarly crept, wept, leapt, left).
The above example uses the verb be (in the past tense form was) to make the passive. It is often possible to use the verb get as an alternative (possibly with slightly different meaning); for example, the active sentence "The ball hit Bob" may be recast in either of the following forms: Bob was hit by the ball. Bob got hit by the ball.
A regular English verb has only one principal part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived.This is the base form or dictionary form.For example, from the base form exist, all the inflected forms of the verb (exist, exists, existed, existing) can be predictably derived.
An example of the latter is provided by the strong and weak verbs of the Germanic languages; the strong verbs inherited their method of making past forms (vowel ablaut) from Proto-Indo-European, while for the weak verbs a different method (addition of dental suffixes) developed.
The simple past or past simple, sometimes also called the preterite, consists of the bare past tense of the verb (ending in -ed for regular verbs, and formed in various ways for irregular ones, with the following spelling rules for regular verbs: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y ...
Some online dictionaries are organized as lists of words, similar to a glossary, while others offer search features, reverse lookups, and additional language tools and content such as verb conjugations, grammar references, and discussion forums. The variety of online dictionaries for specialized topics is enormous, covering a wide range of ...