Most-comprehensive irregular-verbs-list

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Sanmayce

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I am not happy at all with the current situation regarding irregular-verbs-lists, no matter whether given in study-books as appendixes or as dictionary entries.
This lack of seriousness makes me uneasy and sometimes angry, I just cannot stand unfinished works, especially when they are must-have appendixes to any book I dare to say.

1) How many times, in the middle of something or simply when a quick spell-check was needed, did we need a list (not an abridged one) of irregular verbs? Thousands.
2) How many times did we need a list (not an abridged one) of irregular verbs when we [should have] had to make a quick spell-check in the middle of something? Thousands.
3) How many times we had needed a list (not an abridged one) of irregular verbs when we had had to make a quick spell-check in the middle of something? Thousands.
Not by the way, can anyone explain whether above three sentences are [un]acceptable, please.
I suspect that Simple Past & Simple Past combination goes well along with Simple Past & Future in the Past Perfect Simple.
How about Past Perfect Simple in the third one?
Or to put it simply 'How would you write it?!' I would be glad someone to clear this unclear for me composition. It is [every time] a total mess when I am forced to mimic powerful Bulgarian tenses(where many verbs (e.g. proofread - проверя/проверявам) have 2 forms, count by yourself: 14main-tenses X {1|2}forms = {14|28}total-tenses).

My goal is to cooperate in giving a printer-friendly list containing maximum number of such verbs.
I was pleased and shocked at the same time when 2 weeks ago I encountered 600+? irregular verbs downloadable from this nifty forum.

By this time I thought (ignorance is a never ending story) that my compilation of 387 verbs was almost comprehensive.
It was made by doing some(Random House Webster vs Heritage Dictionary) cross-references.
My primary intention is to fill some gaps into this rich in verbs list.
It would be nice (if not mandatory) to have such a list printed and folded into desktop manuals/books i.e. to be constantly available for speed-checks.

I downloaded 'IrregularVerbs_.txt' and after some proofing/sorting the next (definitionless) list with 532 verbs appeared:

>ABIDE ABODE/ABIDED ABODE/ABIDED/ABIDDEN ABIDES ABIDING
...
I received: The text that you have entered is too long (28942 characters). Please shorten it to 10000 characters long.
So I was forced to cut the rest.
...
>ZINC ZINCED/ZINCKED ZINCED/ZINCKED ZINCS ZINCKING

Last night I clashed my (Kaze) mix (of irregular verbs) against that of the host (English Language (ESL) Learning Online - UsingEnglish.com) and the resultant mix (sorted) of 532+6 verbs follows:
to be put

Note1:
Following verbs were missing:
BLESS BLEST/BLESSED BLEST/BLESSED
DEFREEZE DEFROZE DEFROZEN
OUTFLY OUTFLEW OUTFLOWN
OUTSPREAD OUTSPREAD OUTSPREAD
OVERGROW OVERGREW OVERGROWN
PRECUT PRECUT PRECUT

Note2:
I did not dare (it is a work for specialists) to supply a quick definition after added verbs, this means: another revision ought to be made, for instance a very important verb ('forbear') is given only as transitive - the intransitive is missing.

Note3:
Corrected 'Coosing' to 'CHOOSING'.
Added 'CLEPING' after 'Clepes'.
Corrected 'Mistake Mistaking' to 'MISTAKES MISTAKING'.
Corrected 'Prests Presetting' to 'PRESETS PRESETTING'.
Corrected 'DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMT DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMT' to 'DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMED DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMED'.
Deleted 'PRESELL PRESOLD PRESOLD PRESELLS PRESELLING' - a duplicate exists.
Corrected 'Relearn Relearn' to 'RELEARNS RELEARNING'.
Corrected 'To sepnd less money' to 'TO SPEND LESS MONEY'.
Corrected 'reach a traget' to 'REACH A TARGET'.
Corrected 'To transmit something on televison' to 'TO TRANSMIT SOMETHING ON TELEVISION'.
Corrected 'To execute someone by supending' to 'TO EXECUTE SOMEONE BY SUSPENDING'.
Corrected 'To sew with overcast stitiches' to 'TO SEW WITH OVERCAST STITCHES'.
Corrected 'To seperate things' to 'TO SEPARATE THINGS'.
Corrected '>Resew Resewed Resewn/Reswed' to '>RESEW RESEWED RESEWN/RESEWED'.
Corrected 'To preceed something' to 'To precede something'.
Corrected 'inside a lerger one' to 'INSIDE A LARGER ONE'.
Corrected '>Forget Forgot Forgotten Forgets Foregetting' to '>FORGET FORGOT FORGOTTEN FORGETS FORGETTING'.
Corrected 'something is fale' to 'SOMETHING IS FALSE'.
Corrected 'To secure or encirle' to 'TO SECURE OR ENCIRCLE'.
Corrected 'energy doimg something' to 'ENERGY DOING SOMETHING'.
Corrected 'To compenaste or counterbalance' to 'TO COMPENSATE OR COUNTERBALANCE'.

Note4:
There are some differencies between forms in my(underlined) and the big list, but I think it is OK - after all a reminder of obsolete/archaic and other styles is a good thing.

Especially for people (like me) with superficial knowledge of English a printed list must lay on the (non-)computer desktop always.
 

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  • _www.usingenglish.com's_Irregular_Verbs_4-A4-pages.pdf.zip
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Tdol

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Looks interesting, I will go through things in detail when I have a chance later today, but thanks a lot. ;-)
 

Sanmayce

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Thanks a lot Tdol,
I am much happier now, two printer-friendly PDF versions from me:

Three goals already accomplished:
- compact: 10 A4 pages or 5 A4 pages (attached);
- easy to eyes: slender AND tall unproportional Lucida Console font used - thus enabling small (10-45 degree) view angles, that is the sheet can be read easily while it lies on desktop and the reader is by the desktop not bent (70-100 degree) over it;
- comprehensiveness: 620 English irregular verbs.

Now, even if some bug has remained, it is far more convenient to spot it and to fix.

Not by the way I have had some 20 minutes struggle (last year digging in my 26GB corpus of sentences) with determining which preposition to use: 'easy to eyes' or 'easy on eyes'. More than ten years ago maybe it was in PC magazine I have some recollections of an article where the author had used 'easy on eyes'. Are they both correct?

Google ngram says:
0% usage for 'easy to eyes'
0% usage for 'easy on eyes'
Strange enough, I thought these phrases were part of the mainstream.
 

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Sanmayce

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Misery lurks again, I did throw only a glance and I saw you forgot to fix errors from my feedback:

Corrected 'DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMT DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMT' to 'DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMED DAYDREAMT/DAYDREAMED'.
Corrected '>Forget Forgot Forgotten Forgets Foregetting' to '>FORGET FORGOT FORGOTTEN FORGETS FORGETTING'.
Corrected '>Resew Resewed Resewn/Reswed' to '>RESEW RESEWED RESEWN/RESEWED'.
Corrected 'Relearn Relearn' to 'RELEARNS RELEARNING'.
Corrected 'Mistake Mistaking' to 'MISTAKES MISTAKING'.

I would (by myself) totally remake from scratch the entire list, the only problem is that I avoid tasks which I am not capable or not supposed to do.

In order to redeem comprehensiveness a strong if not the strongest candidate Oxford English Dictionary - 2nd Ed. Vers.4.0 was used to glance into the deep.
An excerpt from the help:
"This CD-ROM offers unparalleled access to the world’s most important reference work for the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books."

Above-said sounds like a melody and that's what it is, I would add: OED struck-and-strikes the massivest (so far (since the Samuel Johnson's revisions)) blow on/upon ignorance.
I love it just for sentences like next one (part of 'massive' entry):
1861 Calverley Verses, ‘There stands a City’ 28 Still I Hear you humming of ‘the gal you'd Left behind’ in massive bass.

Hum, '2.5 million quotations' an impressive High-Quality resource, no doubt. As for 'most important reference' - yes, but I cannot fully agree with the 'unparalleled & unsurpassed', the real paragon corpus should be based on the entire collection of printed/electronic texts. AFAIK it took 6 years Google to deliver some 4% of it. These 2.5 million sentences are doomed to become one extra-lite abridged corpus while remaining super useful and authoritative. Hopefully not after 150 years.

Advanced search:
Search for: entries CHECKED
Part of speech filter: verb CHECKED
Search term: 'Pa pple' in FULL TEXT

...
abede
...
ablend
...
acast
...
apay
...
atake
...
attaint
...
awede
...
awhape
...

2830 matches in 1838 entries

Here 1838 verb-by-verb examinations must be done for 'pa. pple.' (passive participle, past participle) and 'pa. t.' (past tense).

Finally it became clear: a Herculean task, the OED staff didn't do it let alone a ESL-dummy like me.
Nevertheless, the burning question remains: Does everyone need OED (instead of one unabridged i.v. list) when it comes to quick-check for some obsolete/archaic/rare irregular verb-form?

If only Samuel Johnson was still alive... The OED would offer a Latin power of one more powerfulness, I am not sure of that I KNOW that.

Add-on:
For misbelievers: count by yourselves: OED 2+ million HQ sentences, Gamera 100+ million LQ sentences, 'Dictionary' Johnson billions of 1st class sentences (especially with the support of time (300 years) and tools (computers)).
One of the reasons to word up my thoughts is the wide-spread narrow approaches/thinking in regards of revealing English, Bulgarian also and many different areas of life (programming also).

And to scale down (for clarity) the current situation of pronunciation dictionaries/sections is just tragical.
Several years ago I bought a paper-edition of '* Pronunciation Dictionary' the impression in short: misery marching on.
I thought to give it as a gift to friend of mine but after second thought (seeing that it would misguide him) I threw it away.
Is it so hard in presence of hundreds of Dr.'s and M.A.'s an unabridged list of pronounced/transcribed words (say 400,000 at least) to be made and given as a gift to humanity, or as David Bowie sings in one of my favorite songs '... this chaos is killing me ...', and what a bizarre joke: my man/idol to be without an academic degree and in the same time to be a LEGEND?!

And to scale up again:
- irregular-verbs list status: unfinished;
- transcribed-words list status: unfinished & unavailable;
- quotations list status: unfinished & unavailable;
- ngrams list status: unfinished;

Well, the language is in constant motion but we are lagging behind in an ugly way, such a shame.

To birdeen's call:
Could you help me again this time with one phrase that haunts me for years:

"Spaceboy you're sleeping now
Your silhouette is so stationary
You're released but your custody calls ..."

/An excerpt from 'David Bowie - Hello Spaceboy' lyrics/

My guess is that 'custody calls' is an idiom (here?) with a special meaning.
Or maybe 'your care/guard is still emitting/active' but still it doesn't make full sense to me.
Or maybe 'your imprisonment shouts/summons/asks/invites/requests' as in 'call' definition:
4.a To summon with a shout, or by a call; hence to summon, cite; to command or request the attendance of, bid (any one) come; formerly also, to ask, invite, ...

As far as I understand he speaks to the spaceboy as if they are one, as if they share one destiny, so my bottom-line-guess:
'your/my custody calls'='your/my tormented self is longing to be free of this chaotic jail'

I cannot feel (as the afro-Americans would say) it. I should surely like to know its exact meaning (here).
A (only one: I have watched several different live versions but there the SHINING was missing) fantastic live performance (especially the Bowie's face - this man is out-of-this-world, one bona-fide alien) of this song is imprinted in my visual memory forever.

Ha-ha, a sharp thought passes my mind: to ask Mr. Bowie himself, but I dare not - my pronunciation would damage his hearing.

And to back up my statements let us turn to OED for help and search for 'custody calls':
Search for: entries
NO MATCHES
Quotations are part of Entries, but anyway:
Search for: quotations
NO MATCHES
Now let's see the entry 'custody', first disappointment: the last quotation is dated: 1891 - not very good at all.
Now let's see the entry 'call', second disappointment: a rich resource but still no trace of what I am looking for.

How about adding these particular verses (by one eminent British musician) to the "... wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books."?
If it is up to me I would at once.
 

Tdol

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British English
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Current Location
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