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In contrast to regular verbs, 'irregular verbs' are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur.
What counts as an irregular verb is strongly dependent on the language itself. In English, the surviving strong verbs are considered irregular. In Old English, by contrast, the strong verbs are usually not considered irregular, at least not only by virtue of being strong verbs: there were several recognised classes of strong verbs, which were regular within themselves.
In Latin, similarly, most verbs outside the first or fourth conjugations have three principal parts, which form part of the lexicon and must be learned. The three principal parts are the present tense stem, the perfect tense stem, and the past participle; a variety of inflections, ablaut, and sometimes reduplication are used to form these parts. For example, the principal parts of ''spondeo'' ("I promise") include ''spopondi'' ("I promised"), showing reduplication, and ''sponsus'' ("promised"); these forms cannot be predicted from the present stem, but when you know all three, the entire system can be constructed from these three parts by rule. This verb is not usually considered irregular in Latin. Latin also exhibits deponent verbs, inflected in the passive voice alone; and defective verbs, missing some principal parts. Truly irregular verbs in Latin are a rather small class; they include ''esse'' ("to be"); ''dare'' and its derivatives ("to give"); ''êsse'' ("to eat"); ''ferre'' and its derivatives ("to carry"); ''velle'' and its derivatives ("to wish"); ''ire'' and its derivatives ("to go"); and ''fieri'' ("to become"). Most irregular Latin verbs are themselves vestiges of the athematic conjugations of Indo-European, a surviving (and regular) group found in Greek.
Greek and Sanskrit show even greater complexities, with widely different thematic and athematic inflection sets; which set goes with which verb stem cannot be predicted by rule. In languages of this type, these variations are not usually enough to label a verb "irregular". They instead form a part of the lexicon; when a verb is learned, the various patterns used to conjugate it must also be learned.
By contrast, in modern English, the strong verbs are largely a closed and vestigial class. (Analogy has created a few new strong verbs, such as ''dive''.) All of the surviving strong verbs differ markedly from other verbs, and thus are classified as "irregular"; here, they are conspicuous exceptions in the midst of a much larger class of rule-bound regular verbs.
In some languages, the count of irregular verbs could be greatly expanded if one were to count verbs that are irregular only in their spelling, but not in their pronunciation. For example, in Spanish, the verb ''rezar'' ("to pray") is conjugated in the present subjunctive as ''rece'', ''reces'', ''rece'', etc. The substitution of ''c'' for ''z'' does not affect the pronunciation. It is strictly a matter of orthography. Therefore, this verb is not normally considered irregular.
Other issues affecting the count of irregular verbs in various languages are:

★ How many patterns of conjugation are considered standard. If a large enough group of irregular verbs in a language have parallel conjugations, it is arbitrary whether to count that as an additional "standard" conjugation or as a large collection of irregular verbs.

★ Which verbs are to be counted as separate, rather than merely prefixed. For example, in English, ''to withhold'' conjugates exactly like ''to hold'', and in Spanish, ''detener'' ("to detain") conjugates exactly like ''tener'' ("to have"). In each case, are these to be counted as two separate irregular verbs, or as a single irregular verb, with and without a prefix?

Contents

Number of irregular verbs in different languages

See also

External links

Number of irregular verbs in different languages

While the term "irregular verb" is not precisely enough defined to allow a definitive count of the irregular verbs in all languages, the following table is illustrative of how much this phenomenon varies across languages.

Language	Count	Notes
Latin	924
Italian	over 400
German	181
English	178	see English irregular verbs and
Danish	131
French	81
Swedish	76
Dutch	55
Spanish	46	see Spanish irregular verbs
Welsh	11
Finnish	≤4 + 4	Only the verb ''olla'' "to be" has one truly irregular ending (added with some consonant assimilation), and a few verbs have rare consonant elision patterns warranting memorizing them. For example, ''juoks+en'' "I run" elides 'k' to give ''juos+ta'' "to run", and ''näh+dä'' "to see" elides 'h' to give ''nä+en'' "I see". Spoken Finnish has further irregularity on the verb "to be" (''oo-'' pro ''ole-'', also occasionally ''o'' pro ''on''), and four additional irregular verbs (''tuu'' "come", ''mee'' "go", ''paa'' "put", ''nää'' "see").
Japanese	≤5	する ''suru'' "to do", 来る ''kuru'' "to come", 行く ''iku'' "to go", ある ''aru'' "to exist (inanimate)", and くれる ''kureru'' "to give (to the in-group)" are irregular. There are also several categories of verbs with either a very small number of members (the five honorific verbs), or conjugations based on multiple stems (''aisuru'' and ''aisu'' "to love" are used interchangeably but the former is not used in certain forms such as the imperative ★ ''aishiro''); these are considered by some authorities irregular and by others not.
Ukrainian	≤3	'Бути ' (to be), 'їсти ' (to eat), 'давати' (to give) are the only irregular "basic" verbs. Also, ''бути'' is irregular in that sense that it withstands inflection except for when forming infinitive (''бути'' (inf.) — ''є'' (non inf.)). Though the actual number of irregular verbs may be considered to be much higher since language's synthetic nature allows to make complex verbs based on these.
Latvian	3	these 3 verbs are 'būt', 'iet', 'dot'
Chinese	1	有 ''yǒu'' forms its negative with 没 ''méi'' rather than with 不 ''bù'' in Mandarin and has a separate negative form 冇 ''mou'' in Cantonese
Northern Sami	1	Only the verb ''leat'' "to be" is irregular; all others are conjugated regularly.
Quechua	1	Only the verb ''kay'' "to be" is irregular.
Turkish	0	-
Interlingua	0	While Interlingua has no true irregular verbs, it has three short verb forms: ''es'' ("is", "am", "are"), ''ha'' ("have", "has"), and ''va'' ("go", "goes"). These forms are optional but widely used. Interlingua also has a few alternate forms of ''esser'' ("to be"), such as ''sera'' for ''essera'' ("will be"). These alternate forms differ from an irregular verb in that they are not a full conjugation. They are optional and rare.
Esperanto	0	(like most constructed languages)

See also

★ English irregular verbs

External links

★ Germanic languages

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★ A list of irregular German verbs; notes are in German

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★ Learn English verbs effectively

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★ List of irregular English verbs and exercises

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★ TheIrregularVerbs All the irregular verbs of the English language. Conjugation, pronunciation, translation and examples

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★ Irregular English Verbs online exercises Practice online exercises with the irregular verbs ans examples

★ Romance languages

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★ includes a list of irregular Catalan verbs.

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★ Orbis Latinus notes on irregular Asturian verbs

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★ Orbis Latinus list of irregular French verbs

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★ Orbis Latinus list of irregular Italian verbs

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★ Orbis Latinus list of irregular Occitan / Provençal verbs

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★ Orbis Latinus list of irregular Portuguese verbs

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★ Orbis Latinus list of irregular Spanish verbs

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★ Orbis Latinus list of irregular Venetan verbs

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★ Italian: list of principal irregular second and third conjugation verbs

★ Other Indo-European languages

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★ PDF on irregular verbs in the Greek New Testament