Verb

Examples

I 'play' up and down.
That is John.
I beat my friend.
They are running .
Go there on Monday.
He said, "Hello!".
Can she play the piano?
The sleeping baby looks beautiful.
She saw the girl who had been bitten by the dog.

A verb is a kind of word (part of speech) that tells about an action or a state. It is the main part of a sentence: every sentence has a verb. In English, verbs are the only kind of word that changes to show past or present tense.^[1]

Every language in the world has verbs, but they are not always used in the same ways. They also can have different properties in different languages. In some other languages (Chinese & Indonesian, for example) verbs do not change for past and present tense. This means the definition above only works well for English verbs.

There are sixteen verbs used in Basic English. They are: be, do, have, come, go, see, seem, give, take, keep, make, put, send, say, let, get.

↑ Huddleston R. & Pullum G.K 2005. A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

[EngGram-1] Huddleston R. & Pullum G.K 2005. A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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