Standard Unix Command to Check English Verb Conjugation – Is There One?

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Having recently come across wordlist and wordnet, two great discoveries on their own, I'm now looking for a similar tool, if simpler, that will take the bare infinitive of a verb and return the simple past and past participle. Example:

$ verbteacher throw

Simple past: threw
Past participle: thrown

Does anybody know where to find verbteacher(1)?

Best Answer

Seems the easiest way is to write it yourself. At the first look I found pretty good website, that can give us all information we need. Thus all we need to do is to write a function that will parse it. So five minutes with bash and voila:

 $ function verbteacher() { 
    wget -qO - http://conjugator.reverso.net/conjugation-english-verb-$1.html | \
    sed -n "/>Preterite\|>Past</{s@<[^>]*>@ @g;s/\s\+/ /g;/e I/s/.* I \([^ ]*\) you .*/Simple past: \1/;/ Past/s/ Past /Past participle: /;p}" ; 
 }
 $ verbteacher go
Simple past: went
Past participle: gone 
 $ verbteacher throw
Simple past: threw
Past participle: thrown

So you can put this function to your ~/.bashrc and use it until the site will change its structure. Hope it will never do it.

Obviously it won't work without the internet connection. Hope this is not critical for you.

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