Regular Verbs – Examples

Have you ever wondered what we would do without verbs? Well, we will just end up with incomplete sentences with no meaning added to them. Verbs are the words that describe actions that one does. They are a core unit in grammar that helps us convey a complete thought or idea.

Verbs in English grammar can take two main forms – Regular verbs and Irregular verbs. In a simple sense, we can say that regular verbs are words that are conjugated in a traditional way, while irregular verbs are not.

In this post, we will focus on the former type i.e. Regular verbs. Regular verbs are easy to learn and understand. However, one needs to have a clear idea of its concept to identify them correctly. So, let us have a comprehensive discussion to avoid any misconceptions.

What are regular verbs?

Verbs are the words that usually describe an action done by someone. Now, verbs are mainly seen in three forms – Present, Past, and Future. The present or the base form, which is basically the present simple tense of a verb, generally describes an action happening now. So, when verbs that are in the base form can be changed or conjugated to their simple past tense or past participle in a traditional way, that is by adding “-ed” or “-d” at the end of the word, they are known to be regular verbs.

In simple words, regular verbs are the type of verbs that use the usual rule to form their simple past tense or past participle. This means they can be turned from their base form to their past form by using the usual method of adding “-ed” or “-d“.

To be more precise, let us take one example verb – “arrive”. Now, the verb “arrive” is in its base form. When we try to change it to its past or past participle form, we will simply add “-ed“, so we get “arrived”. Since it conforms to the usual rule, it is called a regular verb.

Some more examples are

• Call – called, has called
• Play – played, has played
• Argue – argued, has argued
• Accept – accepted, has accepted

And if a verb ends with the letter “y”, it is changed into the letter “i” and then added with “-ed“. So, if we have a verb such as “cry”, we simply turn it into “cried”. Since its rule is still the same, it is a regular verb.

However, there are some rules regarding the spellings of the verbs while turning them into past forms. They are as follows.

If the verb ends with an “e”, we add only “-d“.

Crave - craved

If the verb has a format of consonant-vowel-consonant in its last three letters, we need to double the last letter and add “-ed“.

Stop - stopped

If the verb has a consonant-vowel-consonant format but ends with “y, w, or x,” we only add “-ed”. Or we can simply say if a verb ending with “y” has a vowel preceding it, we only add “-ed“.

Play - played

So, these are the main points that you need to remember to understand and identify regular verbs. If you practice regular verbs, it will become easy to learn irregular verbs that can be trickier.