Strong Pattern: a – o – a and Other Classes (ta, fara, dra)

Beyond the tidy i–e–i and i–a–u classes lies a cluster of smaller strong patterns — and, crucially, the highest-frequency verbs in the language. ta ("take"), gå ("go/walk"), få ("get/may"), komma ("come"), stå ("stand"), dra ("pull") are all strong, and several are also contracted: their infinitives have shrunk to one syllable (ta from older taga, dra from draga), which makes them look wildly irregular. They aren't, really — they fall into a few small groups. Because you reach for these verbs in every other sentence, getting their three principal parts automatic is the single highest-value piece of strong-verb learning. This page sorts them into their patterns.

The a – o – a class

The first group keeps the infinitive's a, swings the past to o, and returns to a in the supine. The pure members:

Note the contracted ones: ta and dra lost the -ga- of their old infinitives (taga, draga), but it reappears in the past and supine — that is where the g in tog/tagit and drog/dragit comes from. slå behaves the same way (slå → slog → slagit), with its å infinitive masking the underlying a. So the pattern is genuinely a–o–a once you see through the contraction.

The å-vowel verbs: få, gå, stå

A second little group is built on å infinitives that contract hard in the past. These are among the ten most common verbs in Swedish, and each is slightly its own creature — learn them as a memorised trio:

Two things to flag honestly. First, få and gå have a genuinely irregular past — fick and gick, with an unpredictable -ick — that no class predicts; you simply learn them. Second, their supines end in a doubled consonant -tt (fått, gått, stått), not the usual -it, because the contracted stem ends in the vowel itself. These are exceptions worth memorising precisely because they are so frequent.

komma and the ö-past verbs

A final mixed set you'll use constantly. komma ("come") has a short, irregular-looking but easily learned triple, and a cluster of verbs forms the past with ö before settling on an a supine:

komma and sova drop their final -ma/-va in the past (kom, sov) and restore it in the supine (kommit, sovit) — the same contraction logic as ta/tagit. falla, hålla, låta form an ö-past, a-supine mini-pattern (föll/fallit, höll/hållit; låta shifts to ä in the past: lät, then låtit). Don't try to unify these into one rule — learn the four or five members and move on.

Why the most common verbs look the strangest

There is a real linguistic reason the everyday verbs are the irregular ones. High-frequency forms are used so often that they resist the "tidying-up" pressure that regularises rare verbs over centuries — speakers hear gick and tog constantly, so the old forms never get smoothed into gådde or tagade. English shows the identical effect: its most common verbs (go/went, take/took/taken, come/came) are exactly the irregular ones. So expect the verbs you need most to be the ones you must memorise most carefully — and take comfort that there are only a couple of dozen of them, and you'll use them often enough to drill themselves in.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• a – o – a: fara/for/farit, ta/tog/tagit, dra/drog/dragit, slå/slog/slagit — the contracted infinitives (ta, dra) restore a hidden g in the past and supine.
• The å-verbs få/fick/fått, gå/gick/gått, stå/stod/stått are top-ten-frequency and partly irregular — note the -ick pasts and the doubled -tt supines; memorise them as trios.
• komma/kom/kommit, sova/sov/sovit drop and restore their final consonant; falla/föll/fallit, hålla/höll/hållit, låta/lät/låtit form a small ö/ä-past, a-supine set.
• The verbs you use most are the irregular ones — by the same frequency effect that makes English go/went/gone irregular. There are only a couple of dozen; drill them.
• Never regularise these (gådde, tagade, fallade) — the strong/contracted forms are obligatory in every register.