Every English speaker has memorized them without being explicitly taught: go/went, sing/sang/sung, write/wrote/written. The past tense of “walk” is “walked.” The past tense of “run” is not “runned.” Children figure this out eventually, but not before producing “goed” and “comed” with total confidence for a year or two. Teachers and learners of English as a foreign language spend substantial time drilling exceptions that seem to have no logic. So why do they exist at all? And why are some verbs irregular while others follow the rules perfectly?
The answers are historical, and they reveal something fascinating about how languages evolve over centuries.
Two Verb Systems, Side by Side
English verbs fall into two broad classes, and both descend from Old English and its Germanic ancestors.
Weak verbs form the past tense by adding a suffix — in modern English, that’s the familiar “-ed” ending. Walk/walked. Jump/jumped. Talk/talked. These are the “regular” verbs, and they represent the productive pattern in modern English: any new verb that enters the language follows this system automatically. If a new technology produces the verb “to google,” it immediately becomes “googled.” If gamers start using “to respawn,” the past tense is “respawned” without anyone deciding it. The weak verb pattern is the default.
Strong verbs form the past tense through a vowel change in the root of the word. This system is called ablaut, and it was systematic and rule-governed in Proto-Germanic — there were predictable classes of verbs that changed vowels in predictable ways. The remnants of those classes are still visible: sing/sang/sung, ring/rang/rung, drink/drank/drunk all follow the same i/a/u pattern. Drive/drove/driven, ride/rode/ridden, write/wrote/written follow another class. These patterns made sense inside the original system. Scattered across modern English without that system context, they look like chaos.
Why Frequency Protects Irregular Forms
If the weak verb ending is so much simpler, why haven’t irregular verbs just… regularized? Some have, slowly, over centuries. But the ones that remain irregular share a notable property: they are almost all extremely common words.
Go, come, see, say, make, take, know, give, find, think, tell, become — these are among the most frequently used verbs in the English language. And high frequency is the single biggest predictor of whether an irregular form survives. The reason is straightforward: the more often speakers encounter the correct irregular form, the more it gets reinforced. Rare irregular verbs, heard and used infrequently, are more easily forgotten, and speakers default to the regular pattern. Common ones are heard so constantly that the irregular form stays sharp.
Linguists call this the frequency effect, and it shows up across languages and across all types of irregular morphology. The oldest, most common words in any language tend to be the most irregular, because they’ve been in constant use since before the modern pattern established itself — and that constant use has kept them alive.
Children Reveal How the Brain Works
The evidence from child language acquisition is some of the most compelling in linguistics. Children don’t learn irregular verbs by being explicitly taught them. They pick them up from exposure, and for a while they use them correctly. A two-year-old will often say “went” and “came” accurately, having absorbed these from speech around them.
Then something interesting happens. As children develop a more explicit grasp of how past tense works — as they internalize the “-ed” rule — they start over-regularizing. They say “goed,” “comed,” “runned,” “breaked.” They apply the rule they’ve just learned even to the exceptions they were previously getting right. Parents often interpret this as regression. It’s actually progress — evidence that the child has extracted a productive grammatical pattern and is applying it systematically.
Eventually, through continued exposure, the correct irregular forms reassert themselves. But the over-regularization phase tells us something important: the brain treats the regular pattern as the rule and the irregular forms as stored exceptions that have to be learned and maintained separately. When the rule is salient and the exception is shaky, the rule wins temporarily.
Irregular Verbs Are Disappearing — Just Very Slowly
This same logic, applied over centuries rather than childhood, explains the long-term trend: irregular verbs do regularize, but on a timescale of generations. Verbs that were irregular in Old English have been converting to the weak pattern for a thousand years. “Help” once had a past tense “holp” — now it’s “helped.” “Climb” had a past tense “clomb” in some dialects — now universally “climbed.” Research has shown that irregular verbs are regularizing at a rate inversely proportional to their frequency: the rarest irregulars regularize fastest, the most common ones are essentially stable.
The verbs likely to survive as irregulars for centuries more are the ones you use every single day. “Went” is not going anywhere.
For anyone who wants to follow this history in depth, two books are worth reading together. Larry Trask’s Language Change is a clear and engaging introduction to how and why languages shift over time, covering sound change, grammatical change, and the social forces behind both. Trask’s Historical Linguistics by Robert McColl Millar extends and updates Trask’s framework with more technical depth, covering reconstruction, language families, and the mechanisms of change across a wide range of languages. Together they give you the tools to understand not just English verb history but the broader patterns governing how all languages evolve.
What This Means for You
Irregular verbs are not mistakes, oversights, or evidence that English is poorly designed. They are fossils — the visible remains of a grammatical system that English inherited from its ancestors and has been slowly dismantling for centuries. The most irregular verbs are the ones that mattered most to the people who spoke Proto-Germanic thousands of years ago: moving, seeing, knowing, coming, going, speaking.
If you’re learning English, that context won’t make drilling them any more fun. But it might make them feel less arbitrary. You’re not learning random exceptions — you’re learning the oldest verbs in the language.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one of our links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.