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It is possible to have a sentence without a verb, but it is unusual. A verb, as mentioned above, is the ‘doing’ word in a sentence. It is the word that drives the sentence along – the ‘action’ word. It is the part of speech by which we are able to say what a thing is – for example, ‘Spot is a dog’ – or with which we are able to describe what a person, animal or thing does – for example, ‘Spot barks loudly’.

The thing to remember about verbs is that they have certain features which are not shared by other parts of speech. They have different forms to indicate at what time an action happened (past, present or future tenses) and they have different forms to indicate who is doing the action (‘I do’, ‘he does’.) To get this wrong is, clearly, ungrammatical.

Verbs are either regular or irregular. Regular verbs add ‘ed’ to form the past tense and, generally, present few problems to the native speaker.

There are, however, over 250 irregular verbs.