Every Language Has Irregular Verbs. They Exist for the Same Reason.

"Go / went / gone."

Every language learner, at some point, stares at an irregular verb table and thinks: why can't they just be regular?

It's a reasonable question. Regular verbs follow patterns. Patterns are learnable. If English said "goed" instead of "went" and "beed" instead of "was," the language would be easier to learn and nothing would be lost. So why does every language on Earth stubbornly maintain a class of verbs that refuse to follow the rules?

The answer is frequency. And once you understand it, irregular verbs stop being frustrating and start being the most useful verbs in the language.

The frequency shield

In 2007, a team of researchers led by Erez Lieberman published a study in Nature that quantified something linguists had long suspected: the rate at which irregular verbs regularize is inversely proportional to how often they're used.

They tracked the evolution of 177 English irregular verbs from Old English to the present. The results were precise: an irregular verb used 100 times less frequently than another irregular verb regularizes 10 times faster. Frequency is protection.

Why? Because regular verbs follow a default rule that speakers can apply to any verb, including ones they've never heard before. If someone invents the verb "to fleem," you know the past tense is "fleemed." You've never heard the word before, but you can generate its past tense because you know the rule.

Irregular verbs don't benefit from this rule. They survive only because speakers hear them so often that they memorize the form directly, without ever needing the rule. "Went" persists not because anyone decided it should, but because people say "went" hundreds of times before they ever consciously learn that "go" is irregular.

The irregular verbs are the ones you already know by heart.

Children show you the process in real time

If you want to see regularization happening live, listen to a three-year-old.

English-speaking children reliably go through a phase where they say "goed" instead of "went," "runned" instead of "ran," and "eated" instead of "ate." This isn't a mistake the way mispronouncing a word is. It's evidence of a system working correctly.

The child has extracted the regular past tense rule (-ed) from the input and is applying it universally, including to verbs that are exceptions to the rule. They haven't yet heard "went" enough times to memorize it as a stored form. Given enough exposure, they will. But the fact that they default to "goed" first proves that the regular rule is the default and irregular forms are memorized overrides.

Steven Pinker, in Words and Rules, calls this the dual-mechanism theory: regular forms are generated by a rule; irregular forms are stored in memory. The two systems compete. When memory wins (because the form is frequent enough to be memorized), you get irregular. When the rule wins (because the form isn't frequent enough to be stored), you get regular.

Children's "errors" are just cases where the rule fires before memory has had enough exposure to override it.

The verbs that regularize are the boring ones

Old English had roughly 350 irregular (strong) verbs. Modern English has about 180. Where did the other 170 go? They regularized, and every single one of them was a low-frequency verb.

Help used to have the past tense holp. It regularized to helped because, while common, it wasn't common enough to resist the -ed rule.

Climb used to be clomb. Regularized. Melt used to be molt. Regularized. Burn is still transitioning. "Burned" and "burnt" coexist, which tells you the regularization is happening right now, in slow motion.

Meanwhile, the verbs that survived as irregular are the ones you use every single day: be, have, do, go, come, say, make, know, see, get, take, give. These are the workhorses of English, so frequent that no generation forgets their forms, no matter how irregular those forms are.

The same pattern holds cross-linguistically. Spanish ir (to go) has the past tense fui, nothing like the infinitive. French aller (to go) conjugates to je suis allé. Japanese する (suru, to do) becomes した (shita). In every language, the most irregular verbs are the most common ones, because only frequency protects against regularization.

A prediction you can test

The Lieberman study makes a testable prediction: irregular verbs that are currently low-frequency will regularize next.

English "smite" (smote, smitten) is already on the way out. "Smited" appears with increasing frequency. "Strive" (strove, striven) is being replaced by "strived" in most dialects. "Cleave" (clove/cleft) has largely regularized to "cleaved."

Meanwhile, "go/went" and "be/was" will still be irregular a thousand years from now. Their frequency is so high that no amount of analogical pressure can regularize them.

The learner's advantage

The practical implication is reassuring: irregular verbs are irregular precisely because you'll encounter them constantly.

"Went" isn't a trap hiding in a dark corner of English. It's one of the first words you learn because "go" appears in virtually every conversation. "Was" isn't an arbitrary exception. It's the third-most-frequent word in English. You'll see it a hundred times before you ever open a grammar book.

This inverts the usual anxiety about irregular verbs. Learners worry: "there are so many exceptions, how will I memorize them all?" But the Lieberman study shows that frequency does the memorization for you. The irregular verbs are exactly the ones you'll encounter enough to learn through exposure. The verbs you don't encounter often enough to memorize are, by definition, the regular ones, because if they were irregular and rare, they'd have regularized already.

The irregular verb table isn't a list of traps. It's a list of the most useful verbs in the language, sorted by how hard the language fought to keep them.

---

Polli tracks the grammar patterns you encounter, including irregular verb forms, so every story builds on what you've already absorbed. Start reading →