Verbos regulares e irregulares

"Irregular" is one of the most overused — and over-feared — words in Spanish grammar. Many verbs that get the label aren't really irregular in a meaningful sense: they obey a pattern, just one different from the default. The verbs that are truly chaotic, where you simply have to memorize each form, are a small and well-known list. The skill is learning to recognize which kind of irregularity you're dealing with, because each kind has its own logic and its own shortcut.

This page sorts the irregular landscape into four buckets and shows you what each looks like.

What "regular" actually means

A regular Spanish verb does exactly what its class predicts: drop the -ar, -er, or -ir ending, attach the personal ending, never alter the stem. Hablar, comer, and vivir are the standard models. If you know them, you know thousands of verbs.

Anything that deviates from this pattern is, by convention, "irregular." But almost all deviations fall into one of four well-defined categories.

The four kinds of irregularity

1. Stem-changing verbs

The most common kind. The ending is regular; the stem vowel changes when it's stressed.

Four patterns:

• e → ie: pensar → pienso
• o → ue: poder → puedo
• e → i: pedir → pido
• u → ue: jugar → juego (unique to jugar)

In the present indicative, the change appears in every person except nosotros and vosotros — because in those two forms the stress falls on the ending, not the stem. This is critical for peninsular Spanish:

Notice vosotros: pensáis, podéis, pedís — no stem change. The form looks reassuringly regular. We dig into this on the stem-changes overview.

2. Spelling-change verbs

Verbs whose pronunciation is regular but whose spelling has to shift to keep that pronunciation consistent.

The main groups:

• -car → -qu- before -e: sacar → saqué (preterite), saque (subjunctive)
• -gar → -gu- before -e: llegar → llegué, llegue
• -zar → -c- before -e: empezar → empecé, empiece
• -ger / -gir → -j- before -a/-o: coger → cojo, dirigir → dirijo
• -guir → loses u before -a/-o: seguir → sigo
• -uir → inserts y between stem and ending in many forms: construir → construyo

In peninsular Spanish the -zar group has an extra layer: the c and z in these forms encode the distinción /θ/, not the /s/ of seseo. So empezar → empiezo (/em.'pje.θo/) and empiezas (/em.'pje.θas/), with the z and c alike pronounced as the th of English "thin." We cover the orthography in spelling-changes overview.

A note on coger: in Spain it just means to take / to grab. In several Latin American countries it has a vulgar sexual meaning, so speakers there prefer tomar or agarrar. In peninsular Spanish, cojo el autobús is utterly neutral.

3. Yo-irregular verbs

Verbs that are regular in five of the six present-indicative forms but have an unexpected yo form. The two main sub-patterns:

"Go" verbs — add -g- to the stem in the yo form:

"-zco" verbs — add -zc- to the yo form of most verbs ending in -cer or -cir whose stem ends in a vowel:

The rest of the present (tú, él, nosotros, vosotros, ellos) is regular for these verbs. Once you've handled the yo form, you're done.

4. Truly irregular verbs

A short list of verbs that don't fit any pattern and have to be memorized form by form. They are also the most frequent verbs in Spanish, which is both bad news (you can't avoid them) and good news (you'll meet each form so often that it sticks fast).

The core list:

• ser — to be (identity)
• estar — to be (state/location)
• ir — to go
• haber — auxiliary "to have"
• decir — to say
• hacer — to do/make
• ver — to see
• dar — to give
• saber — to know (facts)
• poder — to be able
• querer — to want
• tener — to have
• venir — to come
• poner — to put
• salir — to leave/go out

Some of these are only partly irregular — tener, salir, poner, venir are yo-irregular plus stem-changing, for instance — but the ones at the top of the list (ser, estar, ir, haber) are wholly idiosyncratic.

Here is ser in the present indicative as a taste of how unrecognizable a truly irregular verb can be:

There is no surviving stem you can decompose into ser + ending. Each form is its own beast. Sois is the vosotros form — short, common, instantly recognizable in Spain.

And ir (to go) is arguably the most irregular verb in the language, sharing forms with ser in the preterite and with ser-like simplicity in the present:

In the preterite, ir and ser are identical — fui can mean I went or I was. Context tells you which. That's how irregular ir actually is: it borrows another verb's past tense.

English-speaker warning: don't translate irregularity intuitions

If you grew up with English, you have an intuition that "to be" is irregular (am, are, is, was, were) and "to go" is sort of regular (go, going, went). Don't carry that intuition into Spanish.

• Spanish ser is irregular, like English be — but in different places.
• Spanish ir is more irregular than English go. Its preterite is somebody else's past tense.
• Spanish tener, poder, querer, venir are all irregular in ways English have, can, want, come are not.

The frequency-irregularity correlation is the one universal pattern: across languages, the verbs you use most often are the most idiosyncratic, because they're worn smooth by use. Ser, estar, ir, haber, hacer, tener are exactly the verbs you'll use a hundred times a day, so they're exactly the verbs that have eroded into unique shapes.

"Predictably irregular" — patterns within the chaos

A useful concept: most "irregular" Spanish verbs are predictably irregular. They share their irregularity with a group of other verbs. If you know that tener yo-form is tengo, you can predict that contener, mantener, detener, obtener, retener, sostener all do the same thing — contengo, mantengo, etc. Compounds inherit the irregularity of their root.

Similarly:

• Hacer → hago. So deshacer → deshago, rehacer → rehago.
• Poner → pongo. So componer → compongo, suponer → supongo.
• Venir → vengo. So convenir → convengo, intervenir → intervengo.

Learning one verb often unlocks five or ten others for free.

Vosotros and irregularity

A reassuring fact: in many "irregular" Spanish verbs, the vosotros form is the most regular-looking of all. Because vosotros endings carry the stress, they often suppress stem changes, and they look like a straightforward attachment of -áis / -éis / -ís to the infinitive stem.

The two exceptions in that table are vais and sois — the two most irregular verbs in the language. Everywhere else, vosotros looks calm.

How to learn the irregular verbs

A practical sequence:

1. Memorize the present-indicative forms of ser, estar, ir, haber, tener first. These five appear in nearly every sentence you'll hear.
2. Then learn the yo-irregular patterns (-go, -zco) as patterns, not as individual verbs.
3. Then learn the stem-change patterns (e→ie, o→ue, e→i, u→ue), again as patterns.
4. Spelling-change verbs can wait until you start the preterite and subjunctive, where they actually start to matter.

Don't try to memorize a 200-verb list. Learn the pattern, then notice the verbs that follow it as you meet them.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• "Irregular" in Spanish almost always means "predictably irregular" — it follows a pattern shared with other verbs.
• Four kinds: stem changes, spelling changes, yo-irregulars, and the small set of truly chaotic verbs.
• The truly chaotic verbs (ser, ir, haber, decir, hacer, ver, dar, saber, poder, querer, tener, venir, poner, salir) are also the most frequent — you'll learn them fast.
• Vosotros forms are often the most regular-looking, because the stress lands on the ending and suppresses stem changes.
• Compound verbs inherit their root's irregularity (sostener → sostengo follows tener → tengo).

For the full reference of the truly irregular verbs, see Irregular verbs — complete reference. For the patterns, see stem-changes overview and spelling-changes overview.