What is a verb?
Quick answer
A verb is a word that shows an action (run, write, eat), a state of being (is, seem, belong) or an occurrence (happen, become). Every complete sentence needs at least one verb.
In the sentence “The dog barked at the mail carrier,” barked is the verb: it tells you what the dog did. Without it, you’d only have “The dog at the mail carrier,” which isn’t a sentence.
An easy test
Try putting “to” in front of the word, or changing it to the past tense:
- to swim, swam → verb
- to happy, happied → not a verb (happy is an adjective)
The main types of verbs
| Type | What it does | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Action verbs | Show something someone or something does | jump, think, build, laugh |
| Linking verbs | Connect the subject to a description | is, are, was, seem, become, feel |
| Helping (auxiliary) verbs | Work with a main verb to form tense or mood | have, will, can, should, do |
| Transitive verbs | Need an object | She kicked the ball. |
| Intransitive verbs | Don’t need an object | The baby slept. |
In “She has been studying,” has and been are helping verbs, and studying is the main verb.
Verbs change with time
Verbs show tense, telling you when something happens:
- Past: I walked home.
- Present: I walk home.
- Future: I will walk home.
Most English verbs are regular, adding -ed for the past (play → played). Common irregular verbs change in other ways: go → went, eat → ate, be → was/were. The verb to be is the most irregular of all, with forms like am, is, are, was, were, been.
Verbs vs other words
The same word can sometimes be more than one part of speech. Run is a verb in “I run every morning,” but a noun in “I went for a run.” What matters is how the word is used in the sentence.
Words that describe nouns are a different part of speech. Here’s what an adjective is.
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