Home 9 Stative and dynamic verbs ( Page )

Stative and dynamic verbs

Verbs can be divided into two types: stative and dynamic verbs.

Stative verbs are also known as state verbs and dynamic verbs are also known as action verbs.

Do you know the difference between stative and dynamic verbs?

Do you know about an important grammar rule that applies to stative and dynamic verbs?

Read the information below and see if your ideas are correct!


Differences between stative and dynamic verbs

  • Dynamic verbs describe actions.

For example: to run, to work, to sleep, to eat etc.

  • Stative verbs describe things that are not actions.

For example: stative verbs describe feelings, emotions, senses, thoughts, opinions etc. They often refer to things you cannot actually see people doing.


Examples of stative verbs

Thoughts and opinions:

to agree; to know; to realise; to suppose; to understand; to believe; to remember; to think

Feelings and emotions:

to like; to love; to hate; to dislike; to envy; to mind; to want; to need; to desire;

Senses:

to taste; to smell; to hear; to see

States:

to seem; to belong; to own

OTHER POSTS

Using idioms in IELTS

What are idioms? English idioms are expressions that have a meaning of their own, and where understanding all of the individual words doesn't necessarily mean you will understand an idiom. For example, the idiom 'a can of worms' actually has nothing to do with cans or...

read more

The future perfect and the future continuous at Level B2

In this lesson, we will look at the future perfect. We have already looked at the future continuous in Level B1. Here are examples of each form: The future continuous: He will be working tomorrow afternoon. The future perfect: He will have worked 8 hours by the end of...

read more

How Task 1 General Training is scored

Narration: The examiner is looking for your Task 1 letter to demonstrate 4 different aspects in order to get a good result: task achievement, cohesion and coherence, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy First is task achievement, which looks at whether...

read more

Stative and dynamic verbs

We hope you found this page useful! If you did, please share it with your friends 🙂

Go back to the homepage here.

Stative and dynamic verbs