Lit or Lighted? Deciphering Irregular Past Tense Verbs
For actions that occurred in the past, regular verbs follow the same conjugation pattern: You add an “-ed” or “-d” suffix (e.g., “look” becomes “looked,” “bake” becomes “baked,” and so on). But irregular verbs follow different formulas, as their past tense forms are conjugated in less predictable ways. While there
are relatively few English-language irregular verbs, they’re among the most commonly used verbs in our everyday speech. Emily Brewster, a senior editor at Merriam-Webster, said on the Word Matters podcast that there are roughly 200 core irregular verbs in the modern English language, which is less than 3% of all...
