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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 ...
In some verbs, the past tense, past participle, or both are identical in form to the basic (infinitive) form of the verb. This is the case with certain strong verbs, where historical sound changes have led to a leveling of the vowel modifications: for example, let has both past tense and past participle identical to the infinitive, while come ...
The past tense and past participle are identical; they are formed with the ending -ed, which as in the previous case has three different pronunciations (/t/, /d/, /ɪd/). Certain spelling rules apply, including the doubling of consonants before the ending in forms like conned and preferred .
The past tense of regular verbs is made by adding -d or -ed to the base form of the verb, while those of irregular verbs are formed in various ways (such as see→saw, go→went, be→was/were). With regular and some irregular verbs, the past tense form also serves as a past participle. For full details of past tense formation, see English verbs.
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).
The traditional terms are misleading because the participles do not necessarily correspond to tense: [16] the present participle is often associated with the progressive (continuous) aspect, while the past participle is linked with the perfect aspect or passive voice. See the examples below:
A false analogy with other verbs caused dug to become thought of as the 'correct' preterite and past participle form of dig (the King James Bible preferred digged in 1611) and more recent examples, like snuck from sneak and dove from dive, have similarly become popular. Some American English dialects also use the non-standard drug as the past ...
It is formed by combining had (the past tense of auxiliary have), been (the past participle of be), and the present participle of the main verb. Uses of the past perfect progressive are analogous to those of the present perfect progressive, except that the point of reference is in the past. For example: I was tired because I had been running.