Irregular Verbs Practice: 56 Exercises Grouped by Pattern (With Answers)
Open the 56 exercises online (answers behind a tap) or download the printable PDF with an answer key on the last page. No sign-up for either.
Most irregular verbs practice looks the same: an alphabetical table from arise to write, then a gap-fill that pulls forty verbs from it at random. It's easy to make and hard to learn from. The table puts bear next to beat next to become — verbs that have nothing in common except their first letter — and the gap-fill asks students to retrieve each one cold, with no way to use what they already know about the verb before it.
This set is organised around the one thing irregular verbs do share: irregular verb patterns. Not rules — there's no rule that turns go into went — but families of verbs whose forms move the same way. Sing, sang, sung. Ring, rang, rung. Drink, drank, drunk. Once a student has noticed the family, the next verb in it is half-guessed before they reach it, and a wrong answer is easier to check.
The seven irregular verb patterns in the set
The 56 exercises are split into seven groups of eight, roughly in the order a class meets them:
| Group | Pattern | Level | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | No change | A2 | cut – cut – cut, put, hit, let, set |
| 2 | Same past and participle | A2 | keep – kept – kept, sleep, leave, send, build |
| 3 | -ought / -aught | A2–B1 | buy – bought – bought, bring, think, teach, catch |
| 4 | -ew / -own | B1 | know – knew – known, fly, grow, throw, draw |
| 5 | Vowel change i – a – u | B1 | sing – sang – sung, swim, begin, drink, shrink |
| 6 | -en participle | B1 | take – took – taken, write, speak, choose, forget |
| 7 | Mixed review | B2 | lie / lay, rise / arise, strike, hold, be, go |
The first three groups are the forgiving ones: in all of them, the past simple and the past participle are the same word, so a student who knows one knows both. Groups 4 to 6 are where the forms split, and where most intermediate errors live. Group 7 is a review of the pairs that still catch advanced students — lie (rest) versus lay (put down), and rise versus arise.
Why the past participle gets half the gaps
Each sentence asks for one form, and the label under it says which: the past simple, or the past participle inside a present perfect, past perfect or passive sentence. That split is deliberate. Students usually learn the past simple first, because it's what they need to tell a story, and the past participle arrives later with the present perfect. The result, in almost every intermediate class, is a student who can say I drank but writes I have drank, or she has began.
So the set practises past simple and past participle side by side, in the same group, often with the same verb in two different sentences. We sang Happy Birthday sits a few lines above Have you ever swum in the sea? The student has to decide which form the sentence needs before recalling it, which is the decision they get wrong in real writing.
Why "swimmed" and "catched" happen
When a student produces swimmed or catched, it's tempting to read it as not knowing the verb. Usually it's the opposite: the student knows the regular rule so well that it fills in whenever the irregular form doesn't come to mind fast enough. That's the explanation Gary Marcus, Steven Pinker and colleagues gave after analysing 11,521 irregular past-tense forms in the everyday speech of 83 children: the -ed rule steps in when "retrieval fails" (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1992). The study looked at children learning English as their first language, not ESL classes, so treat it as a clue rather than a rule for your classroom. Still, two of its other findings line up with how this set is built. The more often a child heard an irregular form, the less often they regularised it. And verbs were protected by similar-sounding irregulars — exactly the sing, ring, drink kind of family the groups above are organised around.
That's why these exercises are built for repetition rather than a single pass. Each successful recall makes the next one faster, and a pattern group gives students eight recalls of related forms in a row instead of eight unrelated ones. It's the same retrieval-first approach explained in how to teach irregular verbs so they actually stick, applied to a worksheet instead of a game.
How to run the exercises
One group per lesson. Don't hand out all 56. Take one group, or two that go together — groups 2 and 3 pair well, since both have a single past form. Before the gap-fill, put the three forms of two verbs from the group on the board and ask what they have in common. A class that can name the pattern fills the rest of the group faster.
Say it before you write it. Read each sentence aloud with a pause at the gap and let the class call out the form. The spoken pass makes every student attempt the recall, not only the fastest writers. Then run the written version individually or in pairs. As a five-minute opener this works well alongside other ESL warm-up activities.
Mark with the key, then drill the misses. The PDF has the answers on the last page, so you can hand out the sheet and keep the key. Online, each exercise has a Show answer toggle with all three forms. For any verb a student misses, have them say the full sequence aloud three times — drink, drank, drunk — straight after the mistake, when the correction is most likely to stick.
Come back a week later, mixed. A single pass fades. A week on, take two sentences from each group into a mixed quiz, or run group 7 as a short test. If you also mark written work, check which verbs keep coming back wrong in essays; your class's common mistake patterns will tell you which groups to repeat.
When a worksheet isn't enough
A gap-fill is good for accuracy and bad for speed. Students can take as long as they like over each gap, and real conversation doesn't allow that. For the speed half, irRegular Season runs the same verbs as a timed team race: the base form appears, teams have to produce both the past simple and the past participle before the other side, and a wrong answer costs a point. It has three difficulty tiers, from high-frequency verbs like go – went – gone up to rare ones like beseech – besought – besought.
A good sequence is the irregular verbs worksheet on Monday for accuracy, and the race later in the week for speed on the same group.
Download and use
The full set is free and needs no account:
- Irregular verbs practice online: all 56 exercises, grouped by pattern, with the answers behind a tap.
- Printable PDF: A4, black and white, the same 56 irregular verbs exercises with answers on the last page.
FAQ
What's the best way to practise irregular verbs? Short, repeated recall rather than one long session: a group of eight related verbs, said aloud first and then written, and revisited a week later. Grouping by pattern (cut–cut–cut, sing–sang–sung) lets students use the family to check their answer.
Should students learn the past simple and the past participle together? Yes. Learning them separately is how students end up writing "I have drank". Practising both forms of the same verb in the same group forces the choice between them, which is the decision that goes wrong in real writing.
Which irregular verbs should come first? The high-frequency ones with the simplest patterns: verbs that don't change (cut, put, let) and verbs with one past form (keep, buy, think). The vowel-change and -en groups come next, around B1, and pairs like lie/lay belong at B2.
Is there an answer key? Yes. Online, every exercise has a Show answer toggle with all three forms of the verb. In the printable PDF, the answers are on a separate last page so the sheet can go to students without them.
Written by Prof. Vito Schiuma, designer of English, no kidding.