Grammar Tips & Articles »

Six Major Tenses of Verbs

This Grammar.com article is about Six Major Tenses of Verbs — enjoy your reading!


1:27 min read
11,047 Views
  Ed Good  —  Grammar Tips
Font size:

Now you’re ready to conjugate to skip in the six tenses of verbs.

To conjugate a verb, you must include all tenses: present, past, future, present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect. You must account for all persons: first, second, and third. And you must indicate number: singular or plural. Back in Miss Hamrick’s class, she made us take out a piece of notebook paper and write down the chart:

Verb: ________ Tense: ________  
Person Singular Plural
First Person I [verb] We [verb]
Second Person You [verb] You [verb]
Third Person He-she-it [verb] They [verb]

 

Then we had to fill in each tense, meaning that we had to copy the blooming chart six times, a real chore with notebook paper and no copy-and-paste technology. Then we’d insert the assigned verb and conjugate to our little hearts’ content.

Naturally, with regular verbs, conjugation was a piece of cake. All we had to do was add an ‑s, ‑ies, or ‑es for the third-person singular; add ‑ed for all past tenses, singular and plural; and put will down for all the future tenses (although Miss Hamrick insisted on shall for first-person future tenses). Then we had to be sure we could conjugate have, because we needed it for the perfect tenses, where we’d just add the ‑ed verb. Again, those were the regular verbs.

So let’s take a regular verb (one that forms its past tense and past participle the same way, usually by adding ‑ed) and fill in the six charts. Let’s use the intransitive regular verb skip.

Hard Copy

You may download our entire discussion of the Parts of Speech. Simply download the Grammar eBook Understanding the Parts of Speech.

 

Previous: Conditional Structures of Verbs

Next: Conjugating Regular Verbs

Rate this article:

Have a discussion about this article with the community:

0 Comments

    Citation

    Use the citation below to add this article to your bibliography:

    Style:MLAChicagoAPA

    "Six Major Tenses of Verbs." Grammar.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Mar. 2024. <https://www.grammar.com/six-major-tenses-of-verbs>.

    Free, no signup required:

    Add to Chrome

    Check your text and writing for style, spelling and grammar problems everywhere on the web!

    Free, no signup required:

    Add to Firefox

    Check your text and writing for style, spelling and grammar problems everywhere on the web!

    Browse Grammar.com

    Free Writing Tool:

    Instant
    Grammar Checker

    Improve your grammar, vocabulary, and writing -- and it's FREE!


    Quiz

    Are you a grammar master?

    »
    Choose the sentence with the correct word order:
    A The train arrived at the station early.
    B She quickly solved the difficult puzzle.
    C In the park, children play happily.
    D Always he arrives on time for meetings.

    Improve your writing now:

    Download Grammar eBooks

    It’s now more important than ever to develop a powerful writing style. After all, most communication takes place in reports, emails, and instant messages.