The 10 most commonly used verbs in English are the irregular verbs to be, to have, to do, to go, to say, to see, to take and to get, plus the auxiliary verbs can and will. “The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 percent of the language,” said Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in applied mathematics at Harvard University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. It’s a linguistic use it or lose it rule. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that frequent use - in many languages, not just English - gives words their staying power.
Irregular verbs are the bane of any effort to learn English, but new research looking at how language evolves suggests frequent use keeps pesky irregular verbs like 'take' from evolving into 'taked.' REUTERS/Catherine Benson A generic picture of an English dictionary and a thesaurus.
