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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.
Modern English past participles derive from these forms (although the ge-prefix, which became y-in Middle English, has now been lost — except in some rare dialects such as the Dorset dialect, where it takes the form of a-). Old English present participles were marked with an ending in -ende (or -iende for verbs whose infinitives ended in -ian).
For example, the verb write has the principal parts write (base form), wrote (past), and written (past participle); the remaining inflected forms (writes, writing) are derived regularly from the base form. Some irregular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms (as the regular verbs do), as with send–sent–sent.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The verbs have , do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms ( has , does /dʌz/ , says /sɛz/ ).
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:
In English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with the ending -[e]d. Therefore, verbs like play, arrive and enter are regular, while verbs like sing, keep and go are irregular. Irregular verbs often preserve patterns that were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous; in rare cases, there ...