2678: Strong Verbs Are Weakening–But Not Uniformly Apr 20, 2024

In English, there are strong verbs, those modified with internal vowel changes (e.g. “swim; swam; swum” or “rise; raise”) while weak verbs derive via an affix (e.g. “start; started”). Far and away, weak verbs are more common in English. Despite the occasional creation of a new strong form like “sneak; snuck”, with ‘snuck’ becoming more popular than ‘sneaked’ by the start of the 2010’s, strong verbs are increasingly weakening. For instance, the past tense of ‘knit’ has traditionally been ‘knit’ (no change), likewise with ‘put’, ‘wed’, and ‘whet’, but all of these aside from the most commonly used, ‘put’, are starting to take the ‘-ed’ suffix past tense. However, when this is taken into context, the waters are muddied, as some uses are changing faster than others.

Take “lawfully wedded [wife]”, which has been more popular than “lawfully wed [wife]”, at least in writing, since about the year 1800. Likewise, the phrase “wed to the idea” has never been in mainstream use, rather the phrase is with “wedded”. Compare that to the phrase “we wed” and “we wedded” where the weak form, ‘wedded’, actually peaked in the late 1820’s and is almost unheard of today, at least in writing. This verb is funny anyway insofar as it is almost never used in the present tense imperfect, and along with ‘whet’ is probably helped for that reason.

Things are different with “knit sweater” compared to “knitted sweater”, where the weak ‘knitted’ is actually now less popular since the late 1960’s, but “I knitted a sweater”, compared to “I knit a sweater” is more popular since the late 1990’s. It should be noted in the last example that it is also highly variable, and the relative popularity of ‘knit’ or ‘knitted’ as a verb switched several times throughout the 20th century.