Forms of verbs and list of most common verbs

Do all the different English verb forms look too complicated to you? They don’t have to! In fact, it’s not that difficult. Look at the simple system of English verb forms in our article.

In English, there are just five most common forms of verbs:

• Infinitive (the base form)
• Past tense
• Past participle
• The continuous form (the -ing form)
• Third person (the -s form)

There may also be many other forms, for example different grammatical persons of ‘to be’ – am, is, are… (for more details read this Wikipedia article) but these five are the most commonly produced.

So far, so good? Now, you can combine these five forms to create more complex grammar structures. The five forms are like the building blocks of any higher unit, so the good news is, if you learn these, you’re good to start working on your intermediate or even advanced English.

Typically, you can use the forms in combination with others to put verbs into twelve tenses:

1. Present Simple
2. Present Continuous
3. Past Simple
4. Past Continuous
5. Present Perfect
6. Present Perfect Continuous
7. Past Perfect
8. Past Perfect Continuous
9. Future
10. Future Continuous
11. Future Perfect
12. Future Perfect Continuous

Let’s have a look how, taking the verb Listen as an example:

And here’s how to put the verb Listen into the first person in all those twelve tenses:

1. Present Simple – I listen
2. Present Continuous – I am listening
3. Past Simple – I listened
4. Past continuous – I was listening
5. Present perfect – I have listened
6. Present Perfect Continuous – I have been listening
7. Past Perfect – I had listened
8. Past Perfect Continuous – I had been listening
9. Future – I will listen
10. Future Continuous – I will be listening
11. Future Perfect – I will have listened
12. Future Perfect Continuous – I will have been listening

Regular and irregular forms of verbs

English verbs are either regular or irregular. Regular verbs are much easier to work with because they take the -ed ending, which is identical both for the past form and the past participle, and that’s it.

Here’s an example, still using Listen:

• He listened

English irregular verbs are a different story, though. This is where it starts to get tricky and you have to memorize them, especially the past simple and past participle forms, although there are certain patterns to make things easier. They are sometimes called families, where all the verbs in a family follow the same pattern, e.g.:

• bring – brought – brought
• buy – bought – bought
• think – thought – thought

or

• put – put – put
• cut – cut – cut
• let – let – let

Third person

But the simplest category of all the different verb forms is probably the third-person singular, also known as the -s form (yes, that is the -s that we all forget to add to the end of the verb when we talk about he/she!). We say it’s quite simple because all you need to do to put a verb in the third-person singular is to add ‘s’ or ‘es’ to the end, e.g.:

• He listens
• She works
• It plays

And it’s the same both for regular and irregular verbs. No exceptions!

Well… except for modal verbs (e.g. can, may, should…). But life wouldn’t be so beautiful if it was too easy. If you want to know everything about the third person, you can read a more detailed article about here.

List of verb forms

And finally, here are the top 50 irregular verbs in all their five forms (PDF file):

You may be also interested in:

• • Complete list of irregular verbs (there are over 600 of them!)
  • Top 25 of irregular verbs
  • Top 50 of irregular verbs
  • Most common words in english