Regular / Irregular / Spelling Changes / Conjugations
Regular / Irregular / Spelling Changes / Conjugations
Some verbs have predictable spelling changes in certain forms, usually to preserve the pronunciation of the stem. A spelling change alone does not make a verb irregular: most verbs on this page are regular verbs, shown in green. The verbs in red are irregular for another reason as well.
The changed letters are shown in red in the tables.
Source. This is also the position of the Real Academia Española (la RAE). Nueva gramática de la lengua española, § 4.9a (rae.es): «No se consideran, en cambio, irregularidades morfológicas las variantes ortográficas que obedecen a ciertas reglas de aplicación sistemática en la lengua. Así, las alternancias ortográficas que se obtienen en los pares hice ~ hizo; sigo ~ sigue; dirigimos ~ dirijamos o saco ~ saque se deben al código ortográfico estipulado para el español, no a algún tipo de alteración fonológica de los segmentos que intervienen en ellas.» The same chapter (§ 4.9b, 4.9d) keeps verbs like leer (leyó) and verbs whose stress moves, like enviar (envío), among the irregular verbs, and so do we.
Changes: ce que - cé qué
Changes: ge gue - gé gué
Changes: ze ce - zé cé
Changes: co zo - ca za - cá zá
Changes: go jo - ga ja - gá já
Verbs in -guir keep the hard g sound by dropping the u before a and o (seguir → sigo, siga). Every verb with this change on our site is also irregular for another reason, so there is no regular model verb. In the tables the dropped u leaves no letter to color, so this change is not visible in red; the red i in sigo, sigues, siga is the stem change e → i that makes these verbs irregular.
Verbs: conseguir, seguir