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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 has the past participle identical (but a different past tense, came).
Regular in past tense and sometimes in past participle. must – (no other forms) Defective: Originally a preterite; see English modal verbs: need (needs/need) – needed – needed: Weak: Regular except in the use of need in place of needs in some contexts, by analogy with can, must, etc; [4] see English modal verbs: ought – (no other forms ...
In English, the past tense (or preterite) is one of the inflected forms of a verb. 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 ...
This has happened in the case of the English word went, which was originally the past tense of wend, but has come to be used instead as the past tense of go. The verb be also has a number of suppletive forms (be, is, was, etc., with various different origins) – this is common for copular verbs in Indo-European languages.
Regular verbs form the simple past end-ed; however there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms. [2] The spelling rules for forming the past simple of regular verbs are as follows: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y change to -ied (e.g. study – studied) and verbs ending in a group of a consonant + a vowel + a ...
Imperfect tense verbs represent a past process combined with so called imperfective aspect, that is, they often stand for an ongoing past action or state at a past point in time (see secondary present) or represent habitual actions (see Latin tenses with modality) (e.g. 'he was eating', 'he used to eat'). The perfect tense combines the meanings ...
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 verb be has the largest number of irregular forms (am, is, are in the present tense, was, were in the past tense, been for the past participle). Most of what are often referred to as verb tenses (or sometimes aspects) in English are formed using auxiliary verbs.