Questions tagged [strong-verbs]
Questions about verbs that mark their past tense and past participle by changing their stem vowel (“ablaut”) instead of adding a dental suffix. Examples include swim/swam/swum, sing/sang/sung, see/saw/seen, sit/sat, bid/bade/bidden, hold/held, find/found, fight/fought, come/came, run/ran, get/got/gotten, think/thought, grow/grew/grown, freeze/froze/frozen, break/broke/broken, shake/shook/shaken, give/gave/given, ride/rode/ridden, and drive/drove/driven.
2
votes
1answer
80 views
Is “stang” so out of use it is widely considered an incorrect form of “stung”?
I have a sentence in a short story which wants to use 'stang' instead of 'stung'.
Dictionaries that include 'stang' say it is 'obsolete'. Would you as a reader accept it?
a shriek so fierce her ...
8
votes
2answers
650 views
Why does the past tense form of sleep have a weak suffix?
Meaning: to sleep is a strong verb in the Germanic languages. While I'm quite aware that strong vs weak anything has very little bearing on modern English, this is still something that puzzles me.
...
9
votes
4answers
6k views
How common are “arrove” and “arriven” (vs. “arrived”)?
So to start things off, I know that the proper past tense of the word arrive would be the word arrived.
And that sounds fine for me if you are singularly referring to yourself, such as:
I have ...
2
votes
3answers
5k views
Glided, Glid or Glode [closed]
Dictionaries say that the past tense of glide is glided.
‘a few gondolas glided past’
But in my dialect, I say glode and sometimes glid and most people I know also do but apparently glided is ...
4
votes
2answers
19k views
Struck vs Stricken
Is struck or stricken correct in these sentences?
The house was stricken / struck by lightning.
The house had been stricken / struck by lightning.
He was stricken / struck by grief, cancer, etc.
...
18
votes
4answers
24k views
What is the past tense form of s--t [closed]
Are shit, shat, and shitted all correct and fine to use as the past tense of shit?
After a little bit of searching it seems that they are, with shat being Old English.
Is any form more common in ...
8
votes
3answers
3k views
Regular vs. irregular verbs
I recall an English teacher explaining that verbs that change vowels during tense changes were called 'regular' and those that added '-ed' in the past tense were 'irregular'. This seemed counter-...
0
votes
2answers
2k views
Irregular verbs in English
The English language has a huge number of irregular verbs(~470). This is significantly more than other languages e.g. French (~130), German (~200)
Irregular verbs make the English language ...
19
votes
4answers
5k views
Where did “snuck” come from?
Ages ago, I remember typing snuck into a word processor and being surprised to see it flagged as not a word. My current computer seems to be okay with it and my local dictionary has this in its ...
11
votes
4answers
69k views
Would you use the word “swum” these days?
Would you use the word "swum" these days? I mean, grammatically, it is the past participle of the verb "to swim", but it seems to me that no one uses it anymore. If it's the case, how would You ...
9
votes
2answers
3k views
Origin of different past tenses for verbs with the same endings?
Why do we have a situation where the past of "to blow" is "blew", but of "to glow" is "glowed"? And don't say "flew" if you mean "it flowed". The poem Lovers, by Phoebe Cary has many examples of these....
