Irregular Verbs Exercises
How irregular verbs work
Irregular verbs don't take -ed in the past. Each has up to three forms to learn: base (go), past simple (went), and past participle (gone).
- Three forms:
- base – past simple – past participle: see – saw – seen, take – took – taken
- Same all three:
- some don't change at all: put – put – put, cost – cost – cost
- Vowel families:
- patterns repeat: sing–sang–sung, ring–rang–rung, drink–drank–drunk
- Past simple use:
- finished past actions: She went home.
- Past participle use:
- perfect tenses and passives: She has gone. / The car was stolen.
Examples
I saw that film last month, but I've seen better ones.
saw = past simple, seen = past participle
He took the bus this morning because his car had broken down.
take → took; break → broken
She has written three novels and is writing a fourth.
write – wrote – written
The window was broken during the storm.
past participle in the passive
They flew to Rome and spent a week there.
fly → flew; spend → spent
Practice exercises
Choose the correct form
Select the correct verb form for each sentence.
1.She ___ her phone at home this morning.
2.Have you ever ___ sushi?
3.The thief was ___ by the police two days later.
4.I ___ a strange noise in the night.
5.He has ___ his homework already.
Type the correct irregular form
Type the past simple form of the verb in brackets.
Put the words in order
Click the words in the correct order to build the sentence.
11. Build the sentence:
12. Build the sentence:
13. Build the sentence:
14. Build the sentence:
True or false?
Decide if each statement about irregular verbs is true or false.
15.The past simple of 'go' is 'goed'.
16.'Put' has the same form in the present, past simple and past participle.
17."I have wrote a letter" is correct.
18.Verbs like sing, ring and drink follow the same i–a–u vowel pattern.
Frequently asked questions
What is an irregular verb?
An irregular verb is a verb that does not form its past simple and past participle with -ed. Each has its own forms, e.g. go – went – gone, see – saw – seen, put – put – put.
How many irregular verbs are there in English?
Around 200 exist, but roughly 50 account for most everyday usage — verbs like be, have, do, go, get, make, take, come, see and know. Master those first.
What is the fastest way to memorise irregular verbs?
Group them by sound pattern (sing–sang–sung with ring and drink; buy–bought with think and catch), practice them in full sentences rather than lists, and review with spaced repetition. Frequent exposure through reading also fixes them naturally.
What is the difference between the past simple and the past participle?
The past simple stands alone as a finished-past verb (She went home). The past participle never stands alone — it follows have/has/had in perfect tenses (She has gone) or be in passives (The car was stolen).
Do irregular verbs also have irregular -ing forms?
No — the -ing form is always regular for every English verb (go → going, swim → swimming). Only the past simple and past participle are irregular.
Irregular verbs explained in depth
Irregular verbs are leftovers from Old English, when vowel changes — not endings — marked the past tense. The most frequent verbs in the language resisted regularisation precisely because people used them constantly, which explains an apparent paradox: the most common English verbs are the least predictable ones. Any conversation will force you through go/went, get/got, make/made and take/took within minutes.
Each irregular verb has up to three forms to learn. The base form appears in the present, in infinitives and after modals. The past simple carries finished-past meaning on its own. The past participle only ever works with a helper: after have/has/had in perfect tenses, or after be in the passive voice. Learners who mix up 'saw' and 'seen' — saying 'I have saw' or 'I seen it' — are mixing these two jobs.
Rather than memorising an alphabetical table, exploit the hidden structure. One family keeps a single form throughout (put, cut, cost, hit, let). Another changes only once (buy–bought–bought, teach–taught–taught, sell–sold–sold). The trickiest family changes twice, often with an i–a–u vowel ladder (begin–began–begun, swim–swam–swum) or an -en participle (speak–spoke–spoken, write–wrote–written, break–broke–broken). Studying one family at a time roughly halves the effort.
Pronunciation deserves attention too, because spelling misleads: 'read' keeps its spelling but shifts its vowel (/riːd/ → /red/), 'heard' rhymes with 'bird', and 'said' rhymes with 'red'. Saying the three forms aloud as a rhythm — sing, sang, sung — builds the sound memory that spelling drills miss.
The exercises above mix past simple and past participle uses deliberately, because real English constantly switches between them: you narrate with the past simple, then jump to the present perfect for relevance, then to the passive for events. If you can choose the right form in mixed contexts, the verbs are truly yours.