“I goed to the store” sounds obviously wrong to any native English speaker, but the child who says it is actually applying English grammar correctly - they just have not yet memorized which verbs refuse to follow the rule. About 200 English verbs do not take the regular -ed ending in the past tense, and because many of them are the most frequently used verbs in the entire language (be, have, go, say, get, make), you cannot avoid them, and you cannot guess them from a rule. This guide gives you the full list organized by pattern, the pronunciation traps hiding inside them, and the fastest way to actually memorize them.
A regular verb forms its past tense and past participle by adding -ed: walk becomes walked, walked. An irregular verb changes in some other way - a different vowel (sing, sang, sung), a different ending (buy, bought, bought), or no change at all (cut, cut, cut). English has roughly 150 to 200 commonly used irregular verbs, and unlike most grammar rules, there is no pattern that predicts which verbs are irregular just from their spelling or meaning.
The reason traces back to Old English, which had two separate ways of forming the past tense: “weak” verbs added an ending (the ancestor of today's -ed), while “strong” verbs changed their internal vowel instead, a pattern linguists call ablaut, inherited from a much older common ancestor of English, German, and other Germanic languages. Over a thousand years, most strong verbs drifted toward the simpler weak (-ed) pattern - but the most frequently used verbs resisted the change, because words used constantly are exactly the ones speakers keep saying out of pure habit rather than reasoning through a rule. That is why almost every irregular verb in English today - be, go, have, do, say, get, make, know, take - is also one of the most common verbs in the language.
Almost every irregular verb falls into one of four groups. Learning the group, not just the individual word, cuts your memorization work dramatically.
cut - cut - cut, put - put - put, hit - hit - hit, cost - cost - cost, hurt - hurt - hurt, let - let - let, set - set - set, shut - shut - shut. These are the easiest group: nothing changes at all, which also means there is no pronunciation trap - the challenge is purely remembering that “I cut it yesterday” is correct, not “I cutted it.”
buy - bought - bought, bring - brought - brought, catch - caught - caught, think - thought - thought, teach - taught - taught, sell - sold - sold, tell - told - told, find - found - found, have - had - had, make - made - made, say - said - said, pay - paid - paid, hear - heard - heard, keep - kept - kept, sleep - slept - slept, feel - felt - felt, leave - left - left, meet - met - met, sit - sat - sat, stand - stood - stood, win - won - won.
be - was/were - been, go - went - gone, do - did - done, see - saw - seen, eat - ate - eaten, give - gave - given, take - took - taken, know - knew - known, speak - spoke - spoken, break - broke - broken, choose - chose - chosen, drive - drove - driven, write - wrote - written, ride - rode - ridden, rise - rose - risen, fall - fell - fallen, begin - began - begun, drink - drank - drunk, sing - sang - sung, swim - swam - swum, ring - rang - rung, run - ran - run.
come - came - come, become - became - become, run - ran - run (also fits Pattern 3's ending, but the participle returns to the base vowel). This small group is worth calling out separately because learners often assume the participle keeps the past-tense vowel, producing errors like “has came” instead of “has come.”
“Said” is not pronounced “sayd” - it is /sɛd/, rhyming with “bed,” a vowel change that the spelling does not signal at all. Similarly, “heard” is /hɜːrd/, rhyming with “bird,” not “hear-d.” These silent vowel shifts are exactly the kind of trap that makes irregular verbs a pronunciation issue, not just a grammar issue.
All five share the same vowel sound, /ɔː/, as in “saw” - despite being spelled with two different letter combinations (-ought and -aught). Once you learn this sound for one verb in the group, you get the pronunciation of all five for free.
Learners often stress these participles on the wrong syllable or shorten the vowel to match the past tense form (broke, spoke, chose). The participles keep the long vowel and add a full extra syllable: bro-ken, spo-ken, cho-sen - two syllables, not one.
LexiPath builds its core word list from the 1,000 most common English words, and irregular verbs make up a large share of that list, precisely because frequency is the reason they stayed irregular in the first place. Rather than studying a standalone irregular-verb table once and forgetting it, LexiPath's spaced repetition schedule resurfaces each verb - in a real example sentence, at the CEFR level where you are ready for it - right before you would naturally forget it, which is exactly the “use it in a sentence” step this guide recommends, done automatically and on a schedule instead of manually.
Saying “goed,” “buyed,” or “catched” applies the regular -ed rule to a verb that does not take it. The root cause is that the -ed rule is the first and most reliable pattern learners internalize, so the brain defaults to it under pressure. The fix: drill the specific irregular form as its own chant until it is as automatic as the regular rule, rather than relying on conscious correction mid-sentence.
Saying “I have went” instead of “I have gone,” or “I seen it” instead of “I saw it,” confuses the two distinct forms that many irregular verbs require (Pattern 3 above). The root cause is that regular verbs never need this distinction - walked is both the past tense and the past participle, so there is nothing to confuse. The fix: for any Pattern-3 verb, explicitly memorize the pair “simple past + have/has + participle” together, e.g., “saw” alone, but “have seen” together.
Learners correctly learn “stand - stood - stood” but then guess “understand - understood - understood” without checking, which happens to be correct - but the same guess fails for less predictable compounds. The root cause is over-trusting a pattern that mostly holds but has exceptions. The fix: verify each compound verb individually the first time you use it, even when the base verb's pattern seems reliable.
Estimates vary depending on how strictly “commonly used” is defined, but most practical lists for learners cover between 150 and 200 irregular verbs. Of those, roughly 20 to 30 account for the large majority of everyday spoken and written use.
The past tense is used alone to describe a completed action (“I saw the movie”). The past participle is used with “have/has/had” to form perfect tenses (“I have seen the movie”) or with “be” to form the passive voice (“The movie was seen by millions”). For regular verbs these are identical (walked, walked); for many irregular verbs they are not (saw, seen).
Both are irregular verbs whose spelling preserves an older pronunciation that the sound has since drifted away from. “Said” is pronounced /sɛd/ (rhyming with “bed”), and “heard” is pronounced /hɜːrd/ (rhyming with “bird”) - neither follows a spelling-to-sound rule you can predict from the letters alone, which is exactly why irregular verbs need to be learned as whole sound units, not decoded letter by letter.
Focus first on the roughly 20 to 30 highest-frequency irregular verbs (be, have, do, go, say, get, make, know, think, take, see, come...), since these appear constantly in daily conversation. Rarer irregular verbs (forsake, beseech, cleave) can be learned as they come up naturally in reading, rather than memorized up front.
Irregular verbs exist in most languages, including Spanish and Portuguese, which is why a companion guide to verbos irregulares en inglés exists for Spanish-speaking learners covering the exact same English verbs from a different starting language.
Irregular verbs feel like an arbitrary wall at first, but they compress into four learnable patterns, and a small set of about twenty verbs does most of the daily work. Start with that core twenty, drill them as chants and real sentences rather than a flat list, and build the habit with LexiPath, where the highest-frequency irregular verbs are already built into the core word list you will be reviewing anyway. If you are also building vocabulary more broadly, our guide to the most common English words is the natural next step.
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