Most English nouns and verbs follow regular patterns (adding '-s' for plurals, '-ed' for past tense), but some common ones are irregular and must be memorized (e.g., 'child/children', 'go/went/gone'). Knowing these exceptions prevents errors in everyday writing and speech.
Study lists of common irregular nouns and verbs. Create flashcards for the most frequently used ones and practice using them in sentences.
From your earlier study of irregular plurals and irregular verb forms, you already know the most common exceptions by heart: *child/children*, *mouse/mice*, *go/went/gone*, *be/was/were*. What this topic asks you to do is step back and see these as a unified phenomenon — irregularity itself — rather than two separate lists to memorize. Both irregular nouns and irregular verbs share the same origin story: they are the oldest, most frequently used words in English, and old words resist the regularization that sweeps through a language over centuries.
English's regular patterns are relatively recent innovations. The "-s" plural and "-ed" past tense are productive suffixes — they apply automatically to new words (we say "I Googled it," not "I Gwugle it"). But words that entered the language before those rules solidified kept their older forms. That's why *foot/feet* uses a vowel change (called umlaut, a holdover from Old English) rather than *foots*, and why *go/went* is a suppletive pair — two entirely different words that merged into one paradigm over time. Frequency is the key: irregular forms survive because speakers encounter them so often that no one "corrects" them toward the regular pattern.
The practical consequence for you as a writer is that irregulars cluster in the most basic vocabulary. If you can write fluently about everyday topics, you've already internalized hundreds of irregular forms. The difficulty is not frequency — it's edge cases: the verb *lie* versus *lay*, the plural *data* (technically "datum/data," though *datas* appears increasingly in informal use), or irregular forms for less common words like *staff/staves* or *index/indices*. These require deliberate attention because you encounter them rarely enough that your automatic memory doesn't consolidate them.
The most effective learning strategy builds on this insight: instead of treating irregulars as a random list, group them by pattern. Many irregular noun plurals follow the same vowel-change rule (*man/men*, *tooth/teeth*, *goose/geese*). Many irregular verbs follow an ablaut pattern where the vowel changes in predictable ways across the verb's principal parts (*sing/sang/sung*, *ring/rang/rung*, *swim/swam/swum*). Recognizing these patterns turns memorization into pattern recognition, which is far more reliable. When you encounter an irregular you haven't seen before, ask which family it belongs to — you may already know the pattern.