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English irregular verbs are now a closed group, which means that newly formed verbs are always regular and do not adopt any of the irregular patterns. This list only contains verb forms which are listed in the major dictionaries as being standard usage in modern English. There are also many thousands of archaic, non-standard and dialect variants.
The irregular verbs of Modern English form several groups with similar conjugation pattern and historical origin. These can be broadly grouped into two classes – the Germanic weak and strong groups – although historically some verbs have moved between these groups.
This has happened with the strong verbs (and some groups of weak verbs) in English; patterns such as sing–sang–sung and stand–stood–stood, although they derive from what were more or less regular patterns in older languages, are now peculiar to a single verb or small group of verbs in each case, and are viewed as irregular.
Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms (has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/).
The verbs do, say and have additionally have irregular third person singular present tense forms (see below). The copular verb be is highly irregular, with the forms be, am, is, are, was, were, been and being. On the other hand, modal verbs (such as can and must) are defective verbs, being used only in a limited number of forms.
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In BrE, both irregular and regular forms are current, but for some words (such as smelt and leapt) there is a strong tendency towards the irregular forms, especially by users of Received Pronunciation. [citation needed] For other words (such as dreamed, leaned, and learned [1]: 165, 316 ) the regular forms are somewhat more common.
When teaching modern languages, it is usually most useful to have a narrow definition of a "regular verb" and treat all other groups as irregular. See the article irregular verb. Thus for example, most text books for learning English or German treat all strong verbs as irregular, and only the most straightforward weak verb counts as regular.