Spanish Verbs

Spanish verbs are one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate-to-high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in the verb conjugation.

As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Spanish verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most of the Indo-European languages, Spanish verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories:

• Tense: past, present, future.
• Number: singular or plural.
• Person: first, second or third.
• T–V distinction: familiar or respectful (only for second person).
• Mood: indicative, subjunctive, or imperative.
• Aspect: Perfective aspect or imperfective aspect (distinguished only in the past tense as preterite or imperfect).
• Voice: active or passive.

The modern Spanish verb system has fourteen distinct complete paradigms (i.e. sets of forms for each combination of tense and mood), plus one incomplete paradigm (the imperative), as well as three non-temporal forms (infinitive, gerund, and past participle).

The fourteen regular tenses are also subdivided into seven simple tenses and seven compound tenses (also known as the perfect). The seven compound tenses are formed with the auxiliary verb haber followed by the past participle. Verbs can be used in other forms, such as the present progressive, but in grammar treatises that is not usually considered a special tense but just one of the periphrastic verbal constructions.

In Old Spanish there were two tenses (simple and compound future subjunctive) that are virtually obsolete today.

Spanish verb conjugation is divided in four categories known as moods: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and the traditionally so-called infinitive mood (newer grammars in Spanish call it formas no personales, "non-personal forms"). This fourth category contains the three non-finite forms that every verb has: an infinitive, a gerund, and a past participle (more exactly a passive perfect participle). The past participle can agree for number and gender just as an adjective, giving it four possible forms.

There is also a form traditionally known as the present participle (e.g. cantante, durmiente), but this is generally considered a separate word derived from the verb, rather than an inherent inflection of the verb, because (1) not every verb has this form, and (2) the way in which the meaning of the form is related to that of the verb stem is not predictable. Some present participles function mainly as nouns (typically, but not always, denoting a doer of the action, such as amante, cantante, estudiante), while others have a mainly adjectival function (abundante, dominante, sonriente), and still others can be used as either a noun or an adjective (corriente, dependiente). Unlike the gerund, the present participle takes the -s ending for agreement in the plural.

Many of the most frequent verbs are irregular. The rest fall into one of three regular conjugations, which are classified according to whether their infinitive ends in -ar, -er, or -ir. (The vowel in the ending — a, e, or i — is called the thematic vowel.) The -ar verbs are the most numerous and the most regular; moreover, new verbs usually adopt the -ar form. The -er and -ir verbs are fewer, and they include more irregular verbs. There are also subclasses of semi-regular verbs that show vowel alternation conditioned by stress. See "Spanish irregular verbs".

See Spanish conjugation for conjugation tables of regular verbs and some irregular verbs.