The Unshakable, Frozen Verbs
5.7 🗿 The Unshakable, Frozen Verbs
Welcome to the most surprising family of irregular verbs! We call them the Frozen Verbs. These words are completely unchanging—their spelling stays identical across the base, past simple, and past participle forms.
📊 Unchanging Frozen Verbs Matrix
| Frozen Verb | Base Face | Past Simple Face | Past Participle Face | Real Example Sentence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| put | put | put | put | Yesterday, I put the keys on the desk. |
| cut | cut | cut | cut | The company cut its spending budget. |
| set | set | set | set | We set up the network configurations. |
| cost | cost | cost | cost | The license cost five hundred dollars. |
📝 Real-World Examples Explained
1. Present Habit vs. Past Point
- Present: “I always put the laptop in the security locker.”
- Past Simple: “Yesterday, I put the laptop in the security locker.”
Notice: The word looks exactly identical. You must look at context words like always or yesterday to determine the time.
🚫 Common Mistakes: Correct vs. Incorrect
1. Forcing Suffixes onto Frozen Words
❌ Incorrect: “The new hardware license costed the company a lot of money.”
✅ Correct: “The new hardware license cost the company a lot of money.”
Why it’s wrong: Words like cost, cut, and put are completely frozen. Suffixes like costed or putted do not exist in standard English.
✏️ Quick Quiz: Spot the Tense!
Determine if the frozen verb in this sentence is a Present or Past action:
“Three years ago, our business set up its main data center.”
🔑 Quiz Answers
Past Tense (The sentence time anchor “Three years ago” tells us the action is in the past, even though the word set stays frozen).