Main content
The funky -ed irregular verb
These are the most regular of the irregular verbs; while they don't behave exactly like regular verbs, like present tense "walk" become past tense "walked", they do maintain the "-ed" sound. It's just spelled differently.
Want to join the conversation?
- How about some words like cut?(13 votes)
- Cut would stay the same in all tenses. Like David wisely said is is "one of those words that is so irregular, it can barely be classified; I call it a verb for whom time does not exist.".(11 votes)
- Why does the ending for some past tense words, "-ed" become like "-t" as in looked, "-ed" as in greeted, or "-d" as in carried ever though it is the same spelling?(9 votes)
- In the two words you used, how would you tell
greet-ed
fromgreet-t
if the-ed
didn't shift its pronunciation? Sometimes grammar comes down to what sounds right or to what sounds are simplest to form one after the other.(10 votes)
- So does that mean that in some cases p,l,f,s added before 't' can do the work of "ed"?(4 votes)
- With irregular verbs, almost anything is possible. Pay attention to the possibility, though, of differences between British and American spellings. For example, in Britain, a word is "spelt", but in America it is "spelled".(8 votes)
- do some irregular verbs dont have T in the front of the word like tan the t is first(5 votes)
- Like the word "run". Its past tense is "ran".(5 votes)
- Can someone please tell me how "leaped" works as in "I leaped across the threshold"?(6 votes)
- "leap over that candlestick over there" is the present tense
"woah, did you see that jack just leapt over that candlestick!"(3 votes)
- Does the ed apply to all irregular verbs(5 votes)
- No. the -ed is all up in the air when we are dealing with irregulars.(2 votes)
- Why the past form of "leap" isn't "leaped"?(3 votes)
- This is an irregular. English has lots of them.(4 votes)
- For burn, it can be burned and burnt right?(4 votes)
- Yeah. That's one of the tricky ones. I would use "burned" for the past tense, and "burnt" for the past participle, but I might be wrong.(2 votes)
- this is who david alexander is. David Alexander
@alexataiwan
LGBTQ-affirming, retired clergy. 71 years old. Beyond English, I'm fluent in Taiwanese and conversant in Spanish and Mandarin. I now reside in Michigan.(4 votes)- Bro got imaginary beef with someone on khan academy 💀😭(2 votes)
- How does he write so fast?(4 votes)
- i think he screen records and then speeds it up and then does voice over😎(0 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello Grammarians, we're talking about irregular verbs. That is to say that
verbs that aren't formed like regular verbs. And to give you a taste of
what regular verbs look like, just as a refresher,
let's take the word walk. Let's put it in the present tense. Now normally under normal circumstances, we'd wanna just add an ed to it in order to form the simple past tense. So we go from walk to walked. We add this ed ending. And it turns out that there
are a lot of irregular verbs that also behave the same way. When we make the past tense
we have this ed sound. It's just that they're not represented that way in the spelling. I'll give you an example. The present tense form of
the word to sleep is sleep. And when we put it in past tense it is not sleeped but slept. The pt part of slept does the same work as the ed
ending, for the regular plural. So sleep becomes slept, is the same as walk becomes walked. Likewise keep becomes
kept, build becomes built, spend becomes spent, leave becomes left, leap becomes leapt and lose becomes lost. So although these verbs
are all irregular verbs, within their irregularity,
at least in this case there is some common distinctions. They're all still trying to
make the same sound as walked, it just displays differently. So it's not sleeped but slept, not keeped but kept,
not builded but built, not spended but spent,
not leaved but left, not leaped but leapt, not losed but lost. At least as it applies to
modern standard English. And that my friends is the funky ed. You can learn anything. David out.