Principal Parts of Verbs

By 'principal parts of verbs' we mean the most important forms of any verb, out of all the forms it can have.

When we use a verb in a sentence, we use different forms of it for different purposes. Suppose we wanted to use the verb 'to write.' The available forms of verbs would be:

• one-word forms as,
  write, writes, wrote, writing, written; or


• multiple-word forms as,
  am writing, is writing, are writing, was writing, were writing, have written, has written, had written, will write, will be writing, will have written, has been writing, have been writing, had been writing, will have been writing, am written, is written, etc.
  

See the number of forms! And the list is not complete, there are still more...! Almost all verbs have these many forms. This looks like bad news, doesn't it?

Here's the Good News!

You don't have to remember all these forms!

First of all, we need to remember only some of the single-word forms...

• Remember only ONE form of verbs which belong to the group called Regular Verbs.
  If we remember the verb-form 'play' alone, we can derive all the other forms from it—plays, playing, played, and all the forms with more than one word in them.


• Remember only THREE forms of verbs which are called Irregular Verbs.
  Here, if we remember the three forms 'sing, sang, sung", we can get all other forms—'sings' and 'singing' and all the multi-word forms.

The remaining forms can be derived from these ONE or THREE forms according to definite patterns.

When we talk of Principal Parts of Verbs, we mean only these one or three forms, which we need to remember.

There is one major exception...

How many forms have we to remember for the verb 'to be'?

'To be' is an irregular verb, but we need to remember more than the three forms.

The single-word verb forms of 'to be' are eight in number:
am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been. You probably know most of them already.

For Further Reading...

Go from Principal Parts of Verbs to Verbs

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