English verb conjugator

How to use the output, rather than just read it

A conjugation table is a reference, and a reference on its own teaches nobody anything. Three ways to make this one do some work:

Check the participle, not the past. Most learners know that the past of go is went long before they can produce have gone under pressure. The third column is the one that decides whether your present perfect is right, and it is the column people skip. Cover it with your thumb and say the sentence first.

Read down a column, not across a row. Reading across gives you twelve isolated forms. Reading down the past column — I wrote, I was writing, I had written, I had been writing — shows you what actually changes: never the verb, only what stands in front of it. That is the single most useful thing a table like this can show a learner, and it is invisible if you read it the other way.

Then close it and go and use it. Every tense row links to a drill on this site with sixty exercises in it. A form you have recognised is not a form you can produce; the gap between those two is where all the actual learning is.

Why English verbs have three principal parts

English verbs have five forms and only three of them have to be learned. That is the fact the whole table rests on, and it is worth twenty seconds of your attention because it turns a frightening list into a small one.

The -s form (he writes) and the -ing form (writing) are predictable from the base for every verb in the language. There is not one exception in either direction — no verb anywhere has an unguessable -ing form. So they do not need a list.

The past simple and the past participle are different. For most verbs they are both the base plus -ed, which is why the regular pattern feels so easy. For about a hundred and fifty common verbs they are not, and there is no rule that recovers them: nothing about the spelling of go predicts went, and nothing about bring predicts brought unless you already know that a group of verbs behaves that way.

That is why every irregular verb list you have ever seen has exactly three columns — base, past, participle — and not five. The other two forms are not in the list because they were never in doubt. Our full irregular verbs list groups all of them by the sound pattern they share, which is a far better way to learn them than alphabetically.

The spelling rules behind the regular forms

When you type a verb that is not in the irregular table, this tool builds the forms rather than looking them up. Here is exactly what it does, so you can do it yourself on paper.

• -s form. Add -es after s, x, z, ch, sh and o — watches, goes, fixes. A consonant plus y becomes -ies: study → studies. A vowel plus y just takes -s: play → plays.
• -ing form. Drop a silent final -e: make → making. But not the -ee of see or the -ye of dye, where the e is doing audible work. A final -ie becomes -y: lie → lying.
• -ed form. Add -d after a final -e, change a consonant plus y to -ied, and otherwise add -ed.
• Doubling. A one-syllable verb ending consonant–vowel–consonant doubles the last letter: stop → stopping, stopped. Never after w, x or y: snowing, fixing, playing.
• The British -l. In British English a final single -l after one vowel always doubles: travelling, cancelled, modelling. American English writes traveling, canceled. Neither is a mistake; this site is written in British English and the tool follows it.
• Final -c takes a k. panic → panicking, mimic → mimicked. Without the k, the spelling would say /s/.

There is one place where spelling genuinely cannot decide the answer, and this tool does not pretend otherwise. In a verb of more than one syllable, whether the last consonant doubles depends on where the stress falls: beGIN gives beginning, but VIsit gives visiting. Stress is not written down in English spelling, so there is nothing to compute. The tool holds a list of the verbs where the stress is final; a longer verb that is not on that list does not double. If you type an unusual polysyllable and the doubling looks wrong to you, that is why — and you are probably right.

Twelve tenses, three times, four aspects

The twelve rows are not twelve things to memorise. They are three times crossed with four ways of looking at an action, and once you see the grid you can generate any box in it without ever having learned that box.

The three times are past, present and future. The four aspects are simple (it happened), continuous (it was in progress), perfect (it was finished before another point) and perfect continuous (it was in progress up to another point). Three times four is twelve, and that is the entire system.

This also explains why the verb barely changes down a column. Written appears in every perfect box, past, present and future; writing appears in every continuous one. What moves is the auxiliary in front — had, have, will have — and auxiliaries are a closed set of about ten words. Our tenses hub takes each of the twelve one at a time, with a timeline for each.

A worked example: what the tool says about one verb

Here is the complete output for one irregular verb, exactly as the tool produces it. Nothing below has been tidied up by hand.

Present simple              I travel
Present continuous          I am travelling
Past simple                 I travelled
Past continuous             I was travelling
Present perfect             I have travelled
Present perfect continuous  I have been travelling
Past perfect                I had travelled
Past perfect continuous     I had been travelling
Future simple               I will travel
Future continuous           I will be travelling
Future perfect              I will have travelled
Future perfect continuous   I will have been travelling

Two things are worth noticing in that output. The past and the participle are different words, which is what makes this verb irregular and what makes I have wrote one of the most common mistakes in intermediate English. And the -ing form drops the final -e — a rule that applies to every verb in the language, irregular or not, because the -ing form was never irregular in the first place.

Notice the doubled l. travel is stressed on its first syllable, so American English writes traveling with one l — but British English doubles a final single -l whatever the stress, which is why this site shows travelling. That single letter is one of the most reliable ways to tell which side of the Atlantic a piece of writing came from.

Frequently asked questions