Home › Grammar › Irregular verbs

Dutch irregular verbs

Most Dutch verbs are regular ("weak"): you build the past tense with -te or -de and the participle with ge-…-d/-t. The verbs on this page are the exceptions — the "strong" verbs that change their stem vowel, plus a handful of truly irregular ones. There are only a few dozen you actually need, and grouping them by vowel pattern makes them far easier to memorise than a flat alphabetical list.

Strong vs weak: what changes

A weak verb keeps its vowel and adds an ending: werken → werkte → gewerkt. A strong verb changes its stem vowel instead — this vowel change is called ablaut — and takes an -en participle: rijden → reed → gereden. The good news is that strong verbs fall into families that share the same vowel shift, so once you learn the pattern ij → ee → e you can predict a whole group.

Each entry below gives the infinitive, the past singular, the past plural (usually just a lengthened vowel), and the past participle. Master the three principal parts — infinitive, past, participle — and every tense follows. The past tense itself is covered on the past tense page and the participle-based tense on the perfect tense page.

Why bother with patterns at all, rather than just memorising each verb? Because Dutch strong verbs inherited their vowel changes from a small set of ancient templates that English shares — which is why zingen–zong–gezongen lines up so neatly with "sing–sang–sung", and drinken–dronk–gedronken with "drink–drank–drunk". Spotting these correspondences turns a wall of vocabulary into a handful of recognisable families, and it lets you make an educated guess at a verb you have never seen. The guess is not always right — Dutch has its own irregularities — but it is right often enough to be worth having.

One spelling point runs through every table. When a strong verb has a short vowel in the past singular, that vowel usually lengthens in the plural: ik nam but wij namen, ik brak but wij braken. This is not a separate rule to learn; it falls out of the open-syllable spelling logic described on the vowels page, where a single vowel in an open syllable is automatically long.

Pattern 1: ij → ee → e

Pattern 2: ie / ui → oo → o

Pattern 3: i → o → o

Pattern 4: e → a (sg.) → a (pl.) → o

Pattern 5: e / a → ie → same

The truly irregular verbs

A small group refuses to fit any pattern. These are also the highest-frequency verbs in the language, so despite being irregular they are the first ones you should over-learn. Zijn (to be) and hebben (to have) turn up in every perfect-tense sentence, and the modals appear constantly.

The modal verbs — kunnen, moeten, mogen, willen, zullen — have their own present-tense oddities too; those are set out on the modal verbs page.

Frequency first: what to memorise

Do not try to learn all of these at once. Roughly a dozen strong and irregular verbs account for the vast majority of what you will hear: zijn, hebben, gaan, komen, zien, doen, weten, nemen, geven, staan, plus the modals. Learn those cold, then add the pattern groups a family at a time. Because the patterns are shared, each new verb you meet usually slots into a group you already know.

The most efficient way to drill them is in full sentences rather than as isolated forms, so that the verb comes with a ready-made context. A few worked examples across tenses:

Notice how the participle lands at the end of the clause in every perfect-tense sentence (gegaan, gelezen, gedronken), while the simple-past forms (namen, sprak) sit in the ordinary second-verb position. That placement is a word-order matter, not a verb-form matter, and is set out on the word order page.