Verbs by Letter, A to Z

What is on this list?

This hub links to all 26 verb pages on the site, from verbs that start with A through verbs that start with Z — the same question teachers and students often phrase as “action words that start with” a given letter. Each letter has its own page with its own grid of cards, a count of how many verbs are on it, and a search box that filters within that letter; this page exists to get you to the right one.

What makes each letter page more than a word dump is that every card pairs the verb with a short definition, so a bare list of words never has to be cross-checked against a dictionary. Across all 26 pages that adds up to 3,635 defined verbs, sorted by first letter and unevenly distributed the way English actually is — a few letters carry hundreds of common verbs, others barely clear single digits. The site runs matching by-letter hubs for adjectives, nouns, animals and foods, if verbs are not what brought you here.

How this list was built

1. Sourced from Princeton WordNet 3.1. Every verb across all 26 pages comes from WordNet, the lexical database built by linguists at Princeton University, which records 8,691 single-word verbs once two-word phrases are set aside.
2. Filtered by WordNet's own frequency signal. WordNet's semantic concordance is a body of text lexicographers hand-tagged with the specific sense of each word actually in use. Keeping only verbs with at least one tagged sense narrows those 8,691 down to 3,628, trimming the rare and technical tail while keeping the verbs people use.
3. Defined with WordNet's own glosses. Every definition on every card is WordNet's own gloss for that sense, trimmed to the definition itself with usage examples removed. None were rewritten or invented by hand.

What is missing, and why

Two limits apply across every page here. First, the verbs are listed in their base form only, so “ran”, “running” and “runs” will not turn up under R even though “run” will — searching by a conjugated form means converting it back to the infinitive first. Second, phrasal verbs are excluded everywhere: “give up”, “look after” and “run into” are all real WordNet entries, but they are two words, and every page here only covers single words. That is a bigger gap for verbs than for other word classes, since so much everyday English verb usage is phrasal.

The letters are also not evenly matched. X clears WordNet's frequency threshold with zero verbs and Z with just three, so those two pages are built from below-threshold entries with every one marked as such — a competing list claiming a dozen ordinary X or Z verbs is padding, not research. More generally, many of these verbs are also nouns (“run”, “walk”, “hand”), which is a genuine overlap with the noun pages rather than a mistake; the frequency filter is corpus-based and decades old, so a few verbs common online today are missing while a few dated ones remain; and WordNet is American English, so some British spellings will not be where you would expect them.

Why is it free?

Every page in this set, including this hub, is static: it was generated once from WordNet and served as plain HTML, with no model call and no per-visit cost behind any of it. Nothing you type into a search box leaves your browser, there is no account, no watermark, and no paywall standing between you and any of the definitions.