When you’re learning vocabulary words, you’re often focused on lists of nouns or adjectives, but verbs are also an important part of vocabulary development. What makes verbs a bit tricky is how they’re conjugated, or altered (“inflected”), depending on the subject connected to the verb. The conjugation of a verb also involves making sure it reflects whether the action or state represented by the verb occurred in the past, occurs in the present, or will be occurring in the future.

Did you notice the different time-related conjugations in the previous sentence? The suffix -ed is frequently added to verbs when they are in the past tense. The suffix -ing is another common sight when you’re looking at verbs; it’s used to form what’s called the “present participle” that expresses something that’s going on at the time referenced. Each of these conjugations and inflections has the possibility to change the verb’s spelling or even its entire appearance, depending on whether the verb is regular or irregular, and whether there is any rule of spelling that applies due to the specific letters that form the verb.

Here are some examples of verbs and their conjugations:

I write
she writes
they wrote
he is writing

they are
I am
she is
we were
it will be

A good dictionary will give you the complete conjugation of any verb. Make sure you know which form to use in each situation, and that you’re aware of any possible changes in spelling. While many verbs follow the same pattern, the rule that there’s always an exception to every rule in English holds true for conjugation as well. As wordsmith Richard Lederer says, “Today we speak, but first we spoke; some faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.”