Irregular verbs with "-t" endings
About this video
Regular verbs form the past tense by adding -ed, like walk to walked. Some irregular verbs make that same past sound but spell it with a -t instead: sleep becomes slept, keep becomes kept, build becomes built, spend becomes spent, leave becomes left, leap becomes leapt and lose becomes lost.
You'll be able to
- explain how regular verbs form the simple past with -ed.
- write the past tense of irregular verbs that end in -t, like slept and built.
- avoid mistakes like 'sleeped' or 'builded'.
Key words
- regular verb
- A verb that makes its past tense by adding -ed, like walk to walked.
- irregular verb
- A verb that doesn't form its past tense in the usual -ed way.
- simple past tense
- The basic form of a verb for something that already happened, like walked or slept.
Transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello Grammarians, we're talking about irregular verbs. That is to say that verbs that aren't formed like regular verbs. And to give you a taste of what regular verbs look like, just as a refresher, let's take the word walk. Let's put it in the present tense.
Now normally under normal circumstances, we'd wanna just add an ed to it in order to form the simple past tense. So we go from walk to walked. We add this ed ending. And it turns out that there are a lot of irregular verbs that also behave the same way. When we make the past tense we have this ed sound.
It's just that they're not represented that way in the spelling. I'll give you an example. The present tense form of the word to sleep is sleep. And when we put it in past tense it is not sleeped but slept. The pt part of slept does the same work as the ed ending, for the regular plural.
So sleep becomes slept, is the same as walk becomes walked. Likewise keep becomes kept, build becomes built, spend becomes spent, leave becomes left, leap becomes leapt and lose becomes lost. So although these verbs are all irregular verbs, within their irregularity, at least in this case there is some common distinctions.
They're all still trying to make the same sound as walked, it just displays differently. So it's not sleeped but slept, not keeped but kept, not builded but built, not spended but spent, not leaved but left, not leaped but leapt, not losed but lost. At least as it applies to modern standard English.
And that my friends is the funky ed. You can learn anything. David out.
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