Which Conjugation New Verbs Join

When Italians coined a verb for the act of using Google to search the internet, they did not pick googlere or googlire. They picked googlare. When they needed a verb for clicking with a mouse, they made cliccare. For sending a message on WhatsApp: chattare. For posting on social media: postare. The pattern is overwhelming, and it tells you something deep about the structure of the Italian verb system: only the first conjugation (-are) is genuinely productive.

Productivity in linguistics is the ability of a grammatical pattern to attract new members. A productive class welcomes new verbs; an unproductive class is essentially closed and contains only inherited members. Italian's three conjugation classes show wildly different productivity. Almost all new verbs join -are. The -ire class accepts a trickle of newcomers. The -ere class is closed.

This page explains why, what it means in practice, and how it affects the way you should approach unfamiliar Italian verbs.

The basic pattern

When Italian needs to verbify a new noun, an English borrowing, an onomatopoeia, or a brand name, the default choice is -are.

The pattern goes well beyond technology. Italian regularly verbifies sports vocabulary, gaming terms, business jargon, and even brand names with the same -are suffix.

Why -are wins

The dominance of -are has both a historical and a structural explanation.

Historically, -are descends from Latin's first conjugation (-are), which was already by far the largest class in Latin and the only one that productively accepted new verbs in late Latin and early Romance. Every Romance language inherited this productivity: Spanish defaults to -ar (chatear, googlear, clickear), French to -er (chatter, googler, cliquer), Portuguese to -ar (chatear, googlar, clicar). Italian is no exception.

Structurally, -are has the simplest, most predictable conjugation paradigm. Almost no -are verb is irregular (the four classic exceptions are andare, dare, stare, fare — and even fare is irregular only because it descends from a different Latin verb, facere). When the system "absorbs" a foreign verb, putting it in the most regular class is the path of least resistance. There is no risk of the verb developing weird preterite forms or stem alternations — it just takes -o, -i, -a, -iamo, -ate, -ano in the presente and behaves itself.

The -ire class: minimally productive

The -ire class is essentially closed to borrowings. Try to think of an English loanword that became an -ire verb in Italian — there is no widely used example. Tech, sport, gaming, business: every single recent borrowing goes to -are.

The class does have one productive corner: a small number of denominal or deadjectival -isco verbs derived from native roots, like colpire (from colpo, "blow"), fornire (from the older fornitura-family), fiorire (from fiore), arrossire (from rosso). Even these are rare formations from inherited material — they are not the way modern Italian invents new verbs. New verbs from technology, slang, or borrowing always pick -are; the -isco subgroup grows only by an occasional learned derivation.

The takeaway is unambiguous: if you encounter a recent neologism or English borrowing in Italian, it will end in -are. If it ends in -ire, it is part of the inherited stock or a learned derivation, not a fresh innovation.

The -ere class: essentially closed

The -ere class is the smallest of the three and accepts no new members. Every -ere verb in Italian descends from Latin via inheritance — there are no neologisms in -ere. The class is also the most irregular: many -ere verbs have unpredictable past participles and passato remoto forms, which makes adding new members impractical anyway. A speaker confronted with a new verb cannot guess whether its participle is -uto or -so or -tto; better not to invite the question.

This means: if you see an Italian verb ending in -ere, it is part of the inherited stock, and you may need to look up its irregular forms. New invented verbs will never end in -ere.

The orthographic consequence

When an English-origin verb adopts -are, it inherits all the orthographic adjustments of regular -are verbs. Most importantly, verbs whose stem ends in c or g (cliccare, taggare, loggare) need the h-insertion rule before endings starting with e or i.

Note also that English borrowings often double the consonant in writing to reflect Italian phonotactics: English tag → Italian taggare (double g), English stop → stoppare (double p), English click → cliccare (double c). This is not a mistake; Italian verbs of this type genuinely double the final consonant of the borrowed stem to fit the language's syllable structure.

Native and naturalized vs foreign

Some verbs that started as English borrowings have become so naturalized that they are now neutral across registers and used by all generations. Others remain marked as informal, technical, or generational.

A general rule: in formal writing (newspapers, academic prose, business correspondence), prefer the native Italian equivalent when one exists (scaricare over downloadare, pubblicare over postare, stampare over printare). In informal speech and writing (chat, social media, casual conversation), the borrowed verb is often the natural choice. Mixing registers — using googlare in a thesis, or pubblicare un post in a casual chat — sounds slightly off.

Native verbs derived from nouns

The same -are productivity applies when Italian builds new verbs from native nouns or adjectives. The pattern is so robust that you can almost always predict the verb form from the noun.

The -izzare suffix (a more learned variant of -are) is also extremely productive for technical and abstract verbs:

Comparison with other Romance languages

Spanish, French, and Portuguese all share Italian's preference for the first conjugation when borrowing. The endings differ: Spanish -ar, French -er, Portuguese -ar. Italian's -are is the direct continuation of the same Latin -are.

The convergence is striking and not accidental: it reflects a deep structural fact about how the Romance languages handle new verbs. They all kept the Latin first conjugation as the productive default, and all the others as inherited residue.

What to do as a learner

If you are reading or hearing Italian and encounter an unfamiliar verb, here is your decision tree:

1. Does it end in -are? It is almost certainly regular. Apply the standard -are endings. If the stem ends in c or g, remember the h-insertion rule.

2. Does it end in -ire? It might be in the pure subgroup (dormire, partire) or the -isco subgroup (capire, finire). For new or unfamiliar -ire verbs, default to -isco — it is the more productive subgroup and the safer guess.

3. Does it end in -ere? It is part of the inherited stock. Look it up — it may be irregular in the passato remoto and participio passato, even if its presente looks regular.

For invented or borrowed verbs that you need to use yourself (especially in informal contexts), apply the -are suffix and conjugate accordingly. If it sounds wrong to a native speaker, they will correct you, but in 95% of cases your guess will be right.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

Italian's three conjugation classes have very different futures. The -are class is alive and growing — every new verb that enters the language joins it. The -ire class is half-alive, accepting only a trickle of learned formations. The -ere class is closed: no new verb has joined it in centuries.

For learners this means three things:

1. When you guess a new verb, guess -are.
2. When you encounter a verb in -ere, expect possible irregularities and look it up.
3. When mixing borrowed verbs (chattare, googlare, postare) with formal Italian, watch your register — these verbs feel colloquial and should be replaced with native equivalents in formal writing where possible.

For more on how Italian builds verbs from nouns and adjectives, see verb derivation. For the broader picture of English borrowings in modern Italian, see borrowings from English.