The Grammar of ‘Went’: A Tale of Suppletion

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.

What is 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.

A Tale of Two Verbs: The History of ‘Go’ and ‘Went’

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.

• Gān: This was the Old English ancestor of our modern verb “to go”. It meant, as you’d expect, “to go” or “to walk”. But here’s a twist: even back then, gān was already irregular! Its past tense wasn’t derived from itself but was a word called ēode. So, the problem of “go” not having a “goed” is over a millennium old.
• Wendan: This was another common Old English verb, meaning “to turn”, “to travel”, or “to go”. Unlike gān, wendan was a perfectly regular, well-behaved verb. Its past tense was wende. Over time, as Old English evolved into Middle English, this form became wente, and eventually, went.

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).

A Family of Misfits: Other Examples in English

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 Many Faces of ‘To Be’

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:

• Be, being, been: Come from a root meaning “to exist, to grow”.
• Am, is, are: Come from a root meaning “to be”.
• Was, were: Come from a third root meaning “to remain” or “to live”.

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.

The Good, the Better, and the Different

Suppletion also affects adjectives. Consider this:

• Good, better, best: The word “good” comes from one Germanic root, but “better” and “best” come from a different one that originally meant “good” or “beneficial”. The same is true for its opposite: bad, worse, worst.

One Person, Many People

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.

A Global Phenomenon

This isn’t just an English eccentricity. Suppletion is a feature of countless languages around the world, each with its own historical story.

• In Spanish, the verb ir (“to go”) has a present tense like voy (“I go”) but a past tense like fui (“I went”). In a bizarre twist of fate, fui is also the past tense of the verb ser (“to be”)!
• In French, the verb aller (“to go”) uses forms from at least two different Latin verbs. The present tense je vais (“I go”) comes from Latin vadere, while the future tense j’irai (“I will go”) comes from Latin ire.
• In Russian, the word for “person” is человек (chelovek), but the word for “people” is люди (lyudi)—two completely unrelated words.
• In Irish, the word for “woman” is bean, but its genitive (possessive) case is mná.

The Beauty of Imperfection

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.