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Inflected forms of verbs. A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: The base form or plain form ( go, write, climb ), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular. The -s form ( goes, writes, climbs ), used as the present indicative ...
Generally, the only inflected forms of an English verb are a third person singular present tense form ending in -s, a past tense (also called preterite ), a past participle (which may be the same as the past tense), and a form ending in -ing that serves as a present participle and gerund. Most verbs inflect in a simple regular fashion, although there are about 200 irregular verbs; the ...
The simple present, present simple or present indefinite is one of the verb forms associated with the present tense in modern English. It is commonly referred to as a tense, although it also encodes certain information about aspect in addition to the present time. The simple present is the most commonly used verb form in English, accounting for ...
The simple past, past simple, or past indefinite, in English equivalent to the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. [1] Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however, there are a few hundred irregular verbs with ...
For each verb listed, the citation form (the bare infinitive) is given first, with a link to the relevant Wiktionary entry. This is followed by the simple past tense ( preterite ), and then the past participle. If there are irregular present tense forms (see below ), these are given in parentheses after the infinitive. (The present participle and gerund forms of verbs, ending in -ing, are ...
Preterite. The preterite or preterit ( / ˈprɛtərɪt / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective ...
For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms.
The simple past consists of just the past tense (preterite) form of the verb ( he walked, they flew, etc.), although when it is negated, emphasized or inverted it is sometimes necessary to unfuse the verb, using a periphrastic construction with did (as in did he walk? etc.) – see do -support.