Have you ever stopped mid-sentence and wondered, “Why is the past tense of ‘go’ not ‘goed'”? If you learned English as a child, you accepted this quirk without a second thought. But for language learners, and for the curiously-minded among us, it’s a baffling irregularity. Why do we say “I go today” but “I went yesterday”?
The answer isn’t a simple mistake or a random exception. It’s a fossil, a linguistic artifact that tells a fascinating story of language change, competition, and historical accidents. This phenomenon has a name: suppletion.
In linguistics, suppletion is what happens when the inflected forms of a word (like its past tense, plural, or comparative form) come from a completely different root word. Think of it like a sports team. The main player, ‘go’, is on the field for the present tense. But when it’s time to talk about the past, ‘go’ gets benched and a totally different player, ‘went’, is substituted in. They don’t look alike, they don’t sound alike, but they do the same job.
This “substitution” isn’t random. It’s the result of centuries of linguistic evolution, where words merge, fall out of fashion, or are repurposed for new grammatical roles. And the tale of ‘go’ and ‘went’ is a prime example.
To understand why we say “went”, we have to travel back to Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons spoken over a thousand years ago. At that time, there wasn’t just one verb, but two competing verbs with similar meanings.
During the Middle English period (roughly 1150-1500), these two verbs were in a sort of competition. The verb “go” was extremely common, but its past tense, ēode, was starting to fall out of use. For reasons linguists still debate, the past tense of “wend”—wente—stepped in to fill the gap. People started using “go” for the present and “went” for the past. Over time, this pairing became standardized.
What happened to the original verb “wend”? It’s still with us, though it’s much rarer now. You might see it in literary or archaic phrases like “to wend your way through the crowd”. Its original meaning of “to turn” also survives in the verb “to wind” (as in a winding road).
Once you start looking for suppletion, you see it everywhere. It tends to affect the most frequently used words in a language because their constant use protects their irregular forms from being simplified.
The most suppletive word in English is the humble verb “to be”. Its various forms are cobbled together from at least three completely different Proto-Indo-European roots:
So when you say “I am, but I was”, you are using words that have no historical relation to each other whatsoever. They’ve just been assigned to the same team over millennia.
Suppletion also affects adjectives. Consider this:
Even nouns can be suppletive. The standard plural of “person” is “persons”, but we far more commonly use “people”. The word “person” comes to us from Latin persona. “People” also comes from Latin, but from the word populus, meaning a populace or a nation. We borrowed an entirely separate word to serve as the functional plural for another.
This isn’t just an English eccentricity. Suppletion is a feature of countless languages around the world, each with its own historical story.
So, why isn’t the past tense of “go” just “goed”? Because language isn’t a perfectly designed system. It’s a living, breathing, gloriously messy tapestry woven over thousands of years. It’s shaped by migration, conquest, cultural exchange, and the simple, everyday communication of billions of people.
Suppletive words like “went”, “was”, and “better” are not mistakes. They are echoes of the past, preserving the ghosts of forgotten words within our modern grammar. They show us that language is not just a tool for communication, but a museum of its own history, where every “illogical” quirk has a story to tell.
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