Vocabulary Match
Grow your English vocabulary with a free, browser-based matching game. See a word, pick its correct meaning, and build retention through play.
WordsIrregular Verbs
Most English verbs add -ed. A stubborn few do not, and they are the ones used most often. Below: the groups worth learning as groups, and the verbs whose past tense looks identical to the base form.
Choose your difficulty
Pick a level to start playing. You can switch at any time.
How to play
Read the base verb, then tap its past tense.
Tip: your progress and best score are saved in this browser only.
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WordsWhat you are actually practicing
Most English verbs form the past tense with -ed: walk, walked; play, played. A stubborn minority do something else, and the awkward part is that this minority contains most of the verbs used most often — go, be, have, do, say, get, make, know, take, see, come.
No spelling rule predicts go → went or buy → bought. They have to be retrieved, and retrieval is exactly what a timed game trains.
How the game works
You are shown a base verb and four past forms. Pick the one that belongs to that verb. A wrong pick reveals the correct form immediately, so a miss teaches one verb instead of costing you nothing.
Easy uses the most common verbs. Medium widens the set. Hard includes the verbs whose past tense looks identical to the base form.
The groups worth learning as groups
Vowel change only: sing → sang, begin → began, drink → drank, swim → swam, ring → rang.
-ought / -aught: buy → bought, bring → brought, think → thought, teach → taught, catch → caught.
Unchanged: put → put, let → let, cut → cut, hit → hit, read → read.
-ew forms: know → knew, grow → grew, throw → threw, fly → flew.
Strategies that actually raise your score
Learn them in groups, not one by one. Five verbs that share a pattern cost less to remember than five unrelated ones, and a group also lets you reject wrong options without recalling the exact form.
Reject by shape first. If the option ends in -ed and the verb is a core irregular, it is almost certainly wrong. Filtering the regular-looking forms often leaves one candidate.
Say the whole sentence. Yesterday I went, not yesterday I goed. The ear rejects the wrong form faster than the eye does, and under a countdown the ear is quicker.
Watch the identical forms. put, let, cut, hit and read do not change at all. In those questions the correct answer looks like the question, which feels wrong and is right.