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The right-hand column notes whether the verb is weak or strong and whether it belongs to a subclass, and links to descriptions elsewhere. Information about the development of these verbs generally can be found at English irregular verbs; details of the etymology and usage of specific verbs can be found by consulting Wiktionary.
Strong verb may refer to: Germanic strong verb, a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel; Strong inflection, a system of verb conjugation contrasted with an alternative "weak" system in the same language; Irregular verb, any verb whose conjugation does not follow the typical pattern of the language to which it belongs
A strong inflection is a system of verb conjugation or noun/adjective declension which can be contrasted with an alternative system in the same language, which is then known as a weak inflection. The term strong was coined with reference to the Germanic verb , but has since been used of other phenomena in these and other languages, which may or ...
These verbs still exist in modern English; sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and break, broke, broken. In modern English, strong verbs are rare, and they are mostly categorised as irregular verbs. In Old English, meanwhile, strong verbs were much more common and were not considered irregular.
Many of these can be classed as Germanic strong verbs, such as sing (past sang), while others are weak verbs with irregularly pronounced or irregularly spelt past forms, such as say (past tense said /sɛd/). The verb be has two past tense forms: was (first and third person singular) and were (plural and second person).
In Germanic Languages, such as Swedish, Dutch and German, ablaut leveling occurs in relation to strong verbs. In the case of Swedish, the preterite will have a distinct vowel pattern in comparison to the past participle, specifically the preterite. An example of this would be the verb meaning to write, which is conjugated below:
Some originally weak verbs have taken on strong-type forms by analogy with strong verbs. These include dig, dive (when dove is used as the past tense), hide, prove (when proven is used as the past participle), saw (past participle sawn), sew (past participle sewn), show (past participle shown), spit, stick, strew, string, and wear (analogy with ...
In standard English, the formation of preterite and past participle forms of verbs by means of ablaut (as Germanic strong verbs, for example, sing–sang–sung) is no longer considered productive. Newly coined verbs in English overwhelmingly use the 'weak' (regular) ending -ed for the past tense and past participle (for example, spammed, e ...