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The Modern English-ing ending, which is used to form both gerunds and present participles of verbs (i.e. in noun and adjective uses), derives from two different historical suffixes. The gerund (noun) use comes from Middle English-ing, which is from Old English-ing, -ung (suffixes forming nouns from verbs).
(The present participle and gerund forms of verbs, ending in -ing, are always regular. In English, these are used as verbs, adjectives, and nouns.) In the case of modal verbs the present and preterite forms are listed, since these are the only forms that exist with the present form identical for all persons.
The present participle/gerund is formed by adding -ing, again with the application of certain spelling rules similar to those that apply with -ed. The irregular verbs of English are described and listed in the article English irregular verbs (for a more extensive list, see List of English irregular verbs). In the case of these:
Irregular verbs in Modern English include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit , from ...
Like many other Western European languages, English historically allowed questions to be formed by inverting the positions of the verb and subject. Modern English permits this only in the case of a small class of verbs ("special verbs"), consisting of auxiliaries as well as forms of the copula be (see subject–auxiliary inversion).
Traditional grammar uses the term gerund for the -ing form of a verb when it is used as a noun (for example, the verb reading in the sentence "I enjoy reading."). [9] See the sections below for further detail. In Dutch, it translates either the term "gerundium" or the description "zelfstandig gebruikte, verbogen onbepaalde wijs van het werkwoord".
The simple past or past simple, sometimes also called the preterite, consists of the bare past tense of the verb (ending in -ed for regular verbs, and formed in various ways for irregular ones, with the following spelling rules for regular verbs: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y ...
For more on the distinctions between these uses of the -ing verb form, see -ing: uses. For more details on uses of participles and other parts of verbs in English, see Uses of English verb forms, including the sections on the present participle and past participle. The following table summarises some of the uses of participles in English: