adjective

an active verb or sentence has the person or thing doing the action as the subject. ‘You hurt me’ is an active sentence.

adjective

used for describing verbs, forms, and structures that show that something causes something to happen. For example, in the sentence ‘She makes me laugh’, ‘makes’ is a causative verb.

adjective

the continuous form of a verb includes ‘be’ and the present participle of a verb to show that an activity is in progress. For example in ‘He is running to catch the bus’, ‘is running’ is the continuous form of ‘run’.

adjective

a ditransitive verb has both a direct object and an indirect object. In the sentence ‘Pour him some tea’, ‘pour’ is ditransitive.

adjective

an ergative verb can have its object as its subject without changing its meaning. For example, ‘open’ is an ergative verb because you can say ‘I opened the door’ or ‘the door opened’.

adjective

a finite verb is a form of a verb that matches the form of other words in a sentence

adjective

relating to the future tense of a verb

adjective

the imperative form of a verb expresses an order to do something

adjective

an imperfect form of a verb describes an action in the past that is continuous, repeated, or not finished

adjective

an impersonal verb or sentence usually has the word ‘it’ as its subject

adjective

an intransitive verb has no direct object. In the sentence ‘The children played’. the verb ‘play’ is intransitive. Intransitive verbs are marked ‘[I]’ in this dictionary.

adjective

relating to the mood of a verb (=one of the sets of verb forms that shows whether the action is a fact, an order, a wish etc)

adjective

a non-finite verb is either a participle or an infinitive and so does not show a particular tense

adjective

the perfect form of a verb is used for talking about an action that has been completed before the present time

adjective

the progressive form of a verb is used for showing that an action is continuing

adjective

a reflexive verb or pronoun refers back to the subject of the verb. In English, ‘to enjoy yourself’ is a reflexive verb and ‘yourself’ is a reflexive pronoun.

abbreviation

singular

adjective

a singular verb, or the singular form of a verb, is used for talking about actions taken by one person or thing

adjective

used for describing verbs like ‘know’ or ‘own’ that deal with states, as opposed to verbs like ‘listen’, ‘talk’, or ‘go’ that deal with actions

adjective

a transitive verb is always used with a direct object

adjective

a weak verb forms the past tenses in a regular way. Weak verbs in English do this by adding ‘-ed’, ‘-d’, or ‘-t’ to the infinitive.

adverb

noun

adjective

adverb

noun