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What are verbs?

A verb is a word that expresses a state of doing, being, or ownership. If that sounds confusing, consider a simple sentence such as 'John ran'. The word 'John' is a noun, referring to a person. The word 'ran' is a verb which tells us what John did.  Other obvious action verbs are walked, jumped, skipped, climbed, sailed, danced, and other similar words. They may appear in longer sentences - for instance: 'John jumped and skipped on his way home'. In that sentence, the words 'jumped' and 'skipped' are both verbs.

Words like dreamed, slept, thought, smiled, sat, and so on are also verbs, even though they do not express clear forms of action. But they still tell us something about what someone or something was doing.

Every sentence in English should contain a verb of some sort.

Verb tenses

Verbs are confusing to small children, and those learning English, because they come in several different forms. Verbs don't just tell us what action somebody takes, they tell us whether the action is in the past, the present, or the future. The examples given above refer to actions or states that have already happened. When we say 'John ran', we might mean he ran five minutes ago, or we might mean he ran in a race a week ago, or we might mean he ran as a child although now he's an old man. But we don't mean that he is actually running as we speak. The action of running took place in the past. So 'ran' is an example of the past tense. So is 'climbed', and 'slept', and so on.

If we want to talk about John doing something right now, we use a different form of the verb - the present tense. We might say 'John runs fast', or 'John is running a race'. And if we want to talk about what is going to happen in the future, we use the future tense of the verb: for instance, 'John will run tomorrow', or 'John is going to run in the race'.

Verbs with auxiliary (or helping) words

You may have noticed that some forms of the verbs above are in fact two words rather than one - 'will run' (future tense), 'is running' (present tense) and 'is going to run' (future tense). We might also say 'John was running' (past tense), 'John might be going to run' (a form of future tense), 'John had been running' (past tense) - and many other variations on the theme. Whereas small children pick up these forms intuitively, by the time they're about five or six, so long as they hear them used correctly, they are very confusing to people learning English as a second or third language.

Helping - or auxiliary - words that can be used with the main forms of the verbs include:

am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been, going, has, have, had, did, does, shall, will, should, may, might, can, could... and probably several more. These are all verbs in their own right, and can be used as such, but can also be used to modify or change the meanings of other verbs.

Four basic verb forms

There are, however, only four basic forms of any verb, excluding the auxiliary words. These are known as the present, the present participle, the past, and the past participle.

Let's take the basic word walk. That form of the word is its basic present tense. It can be used as it is (eg 'I walk to church every Sunday') or with an s on the end (eg 'he walks very fast'). It can also be used with auxiliary words (eg I have to walk for my health, or I am going to walk more this year).

Simple past tense form of verbs>

The basic past tense of the word 'walk' is 'walked'. Many past tenses are formed from the present form in a similar way, ie by adding '-ed' on the end. They are known as regular past tenses - examples are climbed, dreamed, prayed, jumped, cleaned, sailed. If the present tense of a word ends with 'e' then just a 'd' is added to form the past tense - for instance: danced, smiled, typed, stroked.

It's slightly more complicated if the present form of the verb ends in a consonant followed by -y; in that case, we remove the 'y' and replace it with 'ied' to form the past tense. For instance: rely, relied; spy, spied; cry, cried; reply, replied. And if the present form ends in a single consonant (excluding x and y), following a single vowel, then the final consonant is doubled before adding '-ed'. For instance: repel, repelled; cancel, cancelled; travel, travelled; scan, scanned; pin, pinned; hop, hopped; bob, bobbed; jam, jammed.

[Note that in American English, words which have the emphasis on the first syllable, such as 'travel' or 'cancel' do NOT double the final consonant. But in the UK, Canada, Australia and other English-speaking countries, 'traveled' or 'canceled' are incorrect]

Irregular past forms of verbs

While the 'ed' ending for the past tense is the easiest and commonest, it is not always the case. There are many verbs whose past tense is formed differently - such as 'ran', the past tense of the verb 'run'. This is an example of an irregular verb. There are many, with few discernable patterns. Other examples are: freeze, froze; bring, brought; think, thought; fly, flew; swim, swam; sit, sat; speak, spoke; fall, fell; knew, knew; eat, ate - and many more. Again, this is something that small children pick up just by hearing the correct forms around them, but those learning English as a foreign language find very confusing. Some forms of verb do not change in the past tense - eg 'beat', which is both the present and past tense of the same verb, or 'burst'.

Participle forms of verb

The two other basic forms of a verb are called the present and past participle; both are forms used with auxiliary verbs. The present partiple of regular verbs is formed by adding 'ing' to the simple form (removing the final 'e' if there is one, and doubling the final consonant, if it's doubled to make the past tense). For instance: walking, running, smiling, sitting, flying, replying, seeing, jumping.

The past participle of regular verbs is the same as the ordinary past form.

Irregular verbs form irregular past participles, although the present particple is formed like those of regular verbs. For instance, the word 'freeze', which has past tense 'froze', has present participle 'freezing' , and past participle 'frozen'. ;

Perfect forms of verb tense

In addition to the three main tenses (past, present and future) listed above, there are three more complex forms, known as the perfect tenses. They are characterised by the auxiliary words have, has, had, shall have, and will have, combined with the past tense of the verb. The meaning is subtly different from the basic form of the tenses, in implying something which is completed.

For instance, 'I have walked a long way today' is the present perfect tense of 'walk'. 'I will have walked ten miles by tomorrow' is an example of the future perfect tense. 'Before I broke my leg, I had walked everywhere' is an example of the past perfect tense.

Verbs in different persons

Verbs also change their form slightly, depending on who or what is being described in relation to the verb. Unlike some other languages, most verbs do not vary much in this respect. Already shown above, we say 'I run' but 'John runs'. The only difference is the extra 's' on the end when talking about another person.

Grammarians recognise three different 'persons' in verb forms. If I am doing something, I'm writing in the 'first person'. If I am describing what you are doing, it's the 'second person'. If I'm writing about someone else (male or female), it's 'third person. All these are 'singular' since they're just one single person at a time. If I want to describe what several of us ('we') are doing, that's the 'first person plural'. If I'm talking about you and some of your friends, that's 'second person plural'. And if I'm talking about two or three other people ('they'), it's 'third person plural'.

All that sounds very complicated, whereas the verb forms are in fact quite simple in English. We say: I walk, you walk, he/she walks, we walk, you walk, they walk. The only change is that for the first person singular, we add an 's'. This is true for the vast majority of verbs, regular or irregular, with the only slight variation being the ones that end in a consonant followed by 'y', where we remove the y and add 'ies'. So: I cry, he cries; I reply, he replies; I fly, he flies.

For the past tense, all forms are identical, and the future form of the verb also stays the same for each person, with the auxiliary word 'will' or 'shall' immediately in front (eg I will run, you will run, he will run).

The verb 'to be'.

There is one verb which breaks almost all the rules - oddly enough, it seems to do so in many languages. That is the verb we call 'to be' - used mostly as an auxiliary word, but it's a verb in its own right too, expressing a state of being. The first person form of this verb is 'I am', but we then say 'you are' and 'he/she is'. The plural form is simpler, the same as the second person singular: we are, you are, they are.

The past tense of 'to be' is different again, though slightly simpler: I was, you were, he was; we were, you were, they were. The present participle is 'being', and the past participle is 'been'. And although the word 'be' is not used in any of the present forms, it is actually the present form of the verb which is used in the future tense: I will be, you will be, etc.

Progressive forms of verbs

The above constitutes the main verb forms, but from a grammatical perspective there are still more. One of the more commonly used is the progressive form, which consists of the relevant form of 'to be' as an auxiliary word, and then the present participle. There are six forms of this, reflecting the three basic tenses and the three perfect tenses. So:

Present progressive: I am running, you are running, she is running (etc)

Past progressive: I was running, you were running

Future progressive: I will be running, you will be running

Present perfect progressive: I have been running, you have been running

Past perfect progressive: I had been running, you had been running

Future perfect progressive: I will have been running, you will have been running

Transitive and intransitive verbs

So far most of the verbs can be used (with or without auxiliary verbs) with just one noun: John is climbing, Mary will be running, the cat purred. These verbs are all intransitive. Some verbs, however, make no sense when used in this way. We cannot, for instance, say as a sentence 'I became' or 'you took' or 'he said'. The verbs 'become', 'say', and 'take' are transitive - they need something else after them. We can say 'I became sick' or 'I became a mother'; we can say 'you took a long time', or 'you took my scissors'. The word after the verb does not necessarily have to be a noun, but there has to be something afterwards when using a transitive verb.

Active and passive voice

Transitive verbs can have what is known as 'voice' - a distinction that tells us whether the subject of the verb (the person or thing to which the verb refers) is doing something, or having something done to them. If the subject of the verb is doing the action, the verb form is active. For instance: The dog took the bone. The dog is the subject of the sentence, the bone is the object. (For more about nouns as subject and object, see the page on nouns).

However, if we want to think more about the bone than the dog - for instance, if we're writing about making some soup out of lamb bones - we might say, 'The bone was taken by the dog'. The bone is then the subject of the sentence, but the bone doesn't do any action - it is in the passive voice.

Most of the time, we talk and write using the active voice, but sometimes people write formal documents in the passive voice. To express that concept in the passive voice, I would say: 'some documents are written in the passive voice'. It's a useful form to be able to use in formal writing, if you want to make a point succinctly, but should rarely be used in everyday speech.

The above is probaby more than you ever wanted to know about verbs. But if you're still interested, and would like further examples, here are a few sites that go into even more detail:

What is a verb? - general information about verbs, with a menu at the side exploring various forms in some depth

Verbs - lots of examples of different types of verb

Wikipedia on verb tenses - some historical and linguistic background,detailed description of how verb tenses work, and even more complexity.

Verb tense tutorial - lots of exercises to fill in gaps interactively, if you'd like to learn more about verbs and ensure you understand the different tense forms.

For further information on English grammar, see:

Basic English grammar - why it's worth studying, an overview of the different parts of speech
Nouns - different uses of nouns, with plenty of examples
Pronouns - how to use pronouns, and their different uses in sentences
Adjectives - what adjectives are, how to use them, comparative and superlative forms
Adverbs - what adverbs are, when and how to use them