McGRAW-HILL’S ESSENTIAL English Irregular Verbs This page intentionally left blank McGRAW-HILL’S ESSENTIAL English Irregular Verbs MARK LESTER, PH.D. • DANIEL FRANKLIN • TERRY YOKOTA New York Chicago San Francisco Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City Milan New Delhi San Juan Seoul Singapore Sydney Toronto Copyright © 2010 by Mark Lester, Daniel Franklin, and Terry Yokota. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-07-160287-7 MHID: 0-07-160287-9 The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: ISBN: 978-0-07-160286-0, MHID: 0-07-160286-0. All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. 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Contents Preface vii The English Irregular Verb 1 Summaries of verb formation, tense usage, complementation, and phrasal verbs Regular vs. Irregular Verbs 1 Verb Forms and Tense Usage 1 The Six Basic Verb Forms 1 Base Form 1 Present 2 Past 3 Infinitive 4 Present Participle 5 Past Participle 5 Tense Formation and Usage 6 The Three Simple Tenses 6 The Three Perfect Tenses 7 The Three Progressive Tenses 8 The Intensive Tenses 9 The Passive Voice 10 Verb Complements 10 Complement Types 12 Single Grammatical Element Complements 12 Multiple Grammatical Element Complements 13 Phrasal Verbs 13 Separable and Inseparable Phrasal Verbs 14 The Most Common Phrasal Particles 16 Verbs of Motion 17 Expressions 17 chart Guide to Conjugations 18 chart Guide to Complements and Phrasal Verbs 19 188 English Irregular Verbs 21 Alphabetically ordered, with conjugations, complements, phrasal verbs, and expressions Top 30 Verbs: Full page of examples adjoining select conjugation/complement pages Irregular Verb Form Index 241 Index showing the base form of all irregular verb forms in the book This page intentionally left blank Preface McGraw-Hill’s Essential English Irregular Verbs contains basic conjugations and compre- hensive usage patterns for 188 irregular verbs—all the irregular verbs that you are likely to encounter in even the most extensive reading. We have excluded only archaic and rarely used verbs, like shrive (“offer the religious rite of confession to”) andsmite (“to attack and kill/defeat,” usually encountered only in the King James Bible of 1611). In addition to the basic conjugation of each verb, McGraw-Hill’s Essential English Irregular Verbs provides two unique features: • A complete listing of the complements for each verb Verb complements are grammatical structures that verbs use to make correct, meaningful sentences. Irregular verbs in English have 16 basic complements, plus dozens of combina- tions of these. For instance, the verb make, when it means “force, cause,” uses two comple- ments together: an object and an infinitive. The infinitive, however, must be in its base form, that is, used without the to that normally accompanies an infinitive. object base-form infinitive The teacher made the students sit quietly. Most English learners, even advanced ones, make the mistake of using to with the in - finitive, because that is the more common complement. McGraw-Hill’s Essential English Irregular Verbs and its companion, The Big Book of English Verbs, are the only books that provide the correct complement in a useful format. • A listing of the important phrasal verb constructions for each verb Phrasal verbs are idiomatic combinations of verbs plus adverbs or prepositions. For exam- ple, the phrasal verb show up can mean “to arrive,” even though nothing in the meaning of show or up would lead you to expect this meaning. Moreover, there are important grammatical differences between phrasal verbs that consist of a verb an adverb (separable phrasal verbs) and those that consist of a verb a preposition (inseparable phrasal verbs). If the second element in a phrasal verb is an adverb, the adverb can (and in some cases must) be placed after the object. If the second element is a preposition, however, it can never be moved away from the verb. McGraw- Hill’s Essential English Irregular Verbs not only gives the meaning of every phrasal verb, but also indicates which combinations are separable and which are inseparable. A 2007 study by Harvard scientists revealed that, over the centuries, En glish irregular verbs have been slowly becoming regular. Help and work were once irregular verbs! The scientists predict that wed will probably be the next irregular verb to become completely regular: Wed ~ wed ~ have wed will become wed ~ wedded ~ have wedded. The more com- mon irregular verbs, like be and come, will take thousands of years to become regular. In the meantime, you have McGraw-Hill’s Essential English Irregular Verbs to help you use all of these important verbs correctly. Mark Lester Daniel Franklin Terry Yokota vii This page intentionally left blank The English Irregular Verb REGULAR VS. IRREGULAR VERBS A regular verb forms its past tense and past participle by adding -d or -ed to its base form. This ending may be pronounced /d/ (cared, happened, viewed), /ud/ (committed, needed, listed), or /t/ (mixed, searched, slipped). See pages 3–4 for details. An irregular verb forms its past tense or past participle, or both, in an unpredictable way: by adding no ending at all, by changing the vowel of the base form, by adding a dif- ferent ending, or by using a combination of these methods (let ~ let ~ have let, meet ~ met ~ have met, swim ~ swam ~ swum, blow ~ blew ~ have blown). A verb is irregular based on its pronunciation, not on its spelling; for example, lay (laid ~ have laid) and pay (paid ~ have paid) are regular, because they add /d/ to their base forms for their past tense and past participle—like stay (stayed ~ have stayed)—even though the ayed is spelled aid. Compound verbs, like overeat (< eat), outsell (< sell), and withhold (< hold), form their past tenses and past participles like their root verbs; for example, overeat ~ overate ~ have overeaten. A few high-frequency compound verbs, like broadcast, overcome, and under- stand, are included in the 188 irregular verbs presented here. VERB FORMS AND TENSE usage The Six Basic Verb Forms Six basic verb forms are used to create the entire tense system of English: base form, pres- ent, past, infinitive, present participle, and past participle. These forms are illustrated in the following chart by the regular verb walk and the irregular verb fly. base form walk fly present walk | walks fly | flies past walked flew infinitive to walk to fly present participle walking flying past participle walked flown See “Guide to Conjugations” on page 18. Base Form The base form of a verb is its form in a dictionary entry. For example, if you looked up sang, the dictionary would refer you to the base form sing. The base form is also the source (or base) for the present (with a few exceptions), infinitive, and present participle of the verb, whether the verb is regular or irregular.