Definition: A verb that forms its past tense and past participle by adding -d or -ed (or in some cases

-t) to the base form. (Also known as a weak verb.) Contrast with Irregular Verb. The majority of English verbs are regular. They have four different forms: 1. 2. 3. 4. base form: the form found in a dictionary -s form: used in the singular third person, present tense -ed form: used for the past tense and past participle -ing form: used for the present participle

Examples and Observations:

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"If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied." (Alfred Nobel) "I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees." (Gilbert K. Chesterton) "I had no idea of the character [of the Tramp]. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born." (Charlie Chaplin) "For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can." (Ernest Hemingway) "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." (Samuel Beckett) "Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." (Isaac Asimov) "If I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality." (Richard M. Nixon)

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The Forms of Regular Verbs - "English verbs come in two flavors. Regular verbs have past tense forms that look like the verb with -ed on the end: Today I jog, yesterday I jogged. They are monotonously predictable: jog-jogged, walk-walked, play-played, kiss-kissed, and so on. (Regular nouns, whose plurals end in -s, such as cats and dogs, are similar.) The list of regular verbs is open-ended. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of regular verbs in English (depending on how big a dictionary you consult), and new ones are being added to the language all the time. When fax came into common parlance . . . no one had to inquire about its past-tense form; everyone knew it was faxed. Similarly, when other words enter the language such as spam (flood with E-mail), snarf (download a file), mung (damage something), mosh (dance in roughhouse fashion), and Bork (challenge a political nominee for partisan reasons), the past-tense forms do not need separate introductions: We all deduce that they are spammed, snarfed, munged, moshed, and Borked." (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules. Basic, 1999)

- "The typical verb has an inflectional paradigm of consisting of either four or five forms. . . . Here are some examples: fix, fixes, fixed, fixed, fixing grow, grows, grew, grown, growing The first item in each of these lists (fix, grow) is the base form; the others are inflected. The actual changes from the base form to the inflected forms are different in the two lists. "The pattern of variation shown in the top list is that which occurs for the vast majority of English verbs. For this reason it is known as the regular pattern, and the verbs that inflect like this are called regular verbs. In the regular pattern, there is no difference between the third and the fourth items. . . . "Regular verbs always form their inflected forms by means of adding the standard suffixes to an unvarying stem. Further examples of regular verbs are: try, tries, tried, tried, trying skid, skids, skidded, skidded, skidding Although there are various minor complexities about the spelling and the spoken forms of these words, they are all perfectly predictable--for instance, the change from try to tri- or from skid to skidd-, or the different spoken forms of the suffixes in tries (with a /z/ sound) and looks (with an /s/ sound). These are automatic adjustments of the basic elements. "But irregular inflected forms are quite different. . . ." (David J. Young, Introducing English Grammar. Hutchinson, 1984)