Coming up on Word Matters, verbs of the regular and irregular type.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
We, of course, love the English language and all,
but you know, some of its verbs are just such divas.
I mean, play is fine.
Play, played, have played.
But then you have be with its be, was, have been.
And fly with fly, flew, have flown.
And then there's dream.
Is it I dreamed it or I dreamt it?
Today, a conversation about regular and irregular verbs.
I'll start things off.
A few episodes ago,
we talked about the word plead and it's too possible past tense form pled or pleaded.
I want to talk a little bit more about how just bizarre it is that English has all these different kinds of verbs.
We've got a verb like play, which is what we call a regular verb.
I played today, I played yesterday, I was playing the other day,