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The preterite and past participle forms of irregular verbs follow certain patterns. These include ending in -t (e.g. build, bend, send), stem changes (whether it is a vowel, such as in sit, win or hold, or a consonant, such as in teach and seek, that changes), or adding the [n] suffix to the past participle form (e.g. drive, show, rise ...
The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use – and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense (also called preterite) or the past participle.
When the past participle is used in this way, it invariably ends with -o. In contrast, when the participle is used as an adjective, it agrees in gender and number with the noun modified. Similarly, the participle agrees with the subject when it is used with ser to form the "true" passive voice (e.g. La carta fue escrita ayer 'The letter was ...
The past participle of regular verbs is identical to the preterite (past tense) form, described in the previous section. For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made).
When ser is used with the past participle of a verb, it forms the "true" passive voice, expressing an event ("El libro fue escrito en 2005"/"The book was written in 2005"). When the past participle appears with estar, it forms a "passive of result" or "stative passive" ("El libro ya está escrito"/"The book is already written"—see Spanish ...
To some extent it may be a matter of convention or subjective preference to state whether a verb is regular or irregular. In English, for example, if a verb is allowed to have three principal parts specified (the bare infinitive, past tense and past participle), then the number of irregular verbs will be drastically reduced (this is not the ...
A number of other "strong" past participles, such as pinto, ducho, electo, and a number of others, are obsolete for general use, but are occasionally used in Spain (and to a much lesser extent in Spanish America) among educated, style-conscious writers, or in linguistic archaisms such as proverbs .
English past participles have both active and passive uses. In a passive use, an object or preposition complement becomes zero, the gap being understood to be filled by the noun phrase the participle modifies (compare similar uses of the to-infinitive above). Uses of past participles and participial phrases introduced by them are as follows: