Learning Irregulars

How many irregular verbs?


There are now around 180 irregular verbs in English. That may sound a lot –but there are thousands of regular verbs. Interestingly, irregular verbs are more popular than regular ones.

  • 70% of all the verbs we use
  • The ten verbs we use most are all irregular: be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get.
  • The most infrequent verbs are all regular

Learning irregular endings

We need to work hard to memorise an irregular verb. It takes children years to learn that the past of speak is not speaked.

Some never learn that there is nobody ever ‘writ’ anything. All the common native speaker mistakes – we was, they done etc – involve irregular verbs.

And yet children have a remarkable capacity to memorise new words. They learn new one every two hours and know an average 60,000 by the age of 13.

That doesn’t mean that they have to use more than one at a time, of course (Question: ‘What did you do today? Answer: ‘Nothing.’)

For a video lesson on irregular verbs click here


The Future for Irregular Verbs

Try this quiz about English language. And these crosswords here and here.