Virtuous English AcademyCommon Actions — B1 English Vocabulary
This B1 vocabulary list gathers 40 intermediate English words about common actions — everyday verbs of movement and handling. Every word comes with a simple definition, its British-English pronunciation and a natural example sentence, so you learn each one in real context. When you are ready, open the flashcards to practise and remember them for good.
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Using common actions words in English
Almost every verb on this list is irregular, which makes this page less a vocabulary lesson than a past-tense workout. Throw, catch, hit, tear, bend, spread and drop divide neatly into three groups by how their past forms behave, and seeing the groups is far more efficient than learning twenty forms one at a time.
What to watch out for
Group one: no change at all
Hit, spread, cut, put and let are identical in all three forms: hit, hit, hit. This means the past and the present look the same, and only the context tells you which is meant: Yesterday he hit the ball against He hits the ball every time. These are among the easiest irregular verbs to use and the easiest to overlook.
Group two: past and participle share one form
Catch gives caught, caught; bend gives bent, bent; hold gives held, held. Lift, drop, push, pull, kick, squeeze, fold and gather are all regular and simply take -ed. This is the largest group in English, and once you know the past simple, the participle costs you nothing.
Group three: three different forms
Throw, threw, thrown and tear, tore, torn change twice, and the participle usually ends in -n. The same shape appears in break, broke, broken, choose, chose, chosen and speak, spoke, spoken. Note that tear meaning to rip is pronounced like air, while the tear that falls from your eye rhymes with ear and is a different word altogether.
Words learners mix up
Three tables: four verbs for moving something with your hands, four for how a body moves, and four that change the shape of a thing — with the small words that come after them.
Moving something with your hands
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| grab | To take hold suddenly and roughly. Informally it also means to get something quickly: grab a coffee. | She grabbed her coat and ran. |
| squeeze | To press from both sides. It also means to fit into a small space: squeeze in. | He squeezed the lemon over the fish. |
| drag | To pull something along the ground because it is too heavy to lift. The g doubles: dragged. | They dragged the sofa into the next room. |
| lift | To raise into the air. In British English a lift is also the machine Americans call an elevator. | Do not try to lift that on your own. |
The useful contrast is lift against raise: lifting takes the weight of a physical object, while raising is about moving something upward and works for prices, hands and questions alike. Grab has become the ordinary informal verb for getting anything at speed, and that use is now far commoner than the literal one.
How a body moves
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| crawl | To move on hands and knees. It also describes traffic moving very slowly. | The baby has just started to crawl. |
| lean | To rest against something or to bend from upright. It takes against, on or out of. | He leaned against the doorway. |
| slide | To move smoothly across a surface. Irregular: slide, slid, slid. | The drawer slides open easily. |
| climb | To go up using hands and feet — but it also takes down, over and into. | They climbed over the wall. |
Climb down surprises learners because the verb seems to mean going up, and English uses it happily for both directions. British English also gives lean two past forms, leaned and leant, with the second pronounced to rhyme with bent; both are correct and the pattern repeats in learnt and dreamt.
Changing the shape of a thing
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| bend | To make something curved. Irregular: bend, bent, bent, and bend down is what a person does. | The wind bent the young trees right over. |
| fold | To bend something flat over itself. Fold up a map, fold your arms. | She folded the letter into three. |
| wrap | To cover by folding something round it. The p doubles, and the w is silent. | He wrapped the present badly. |
| stick | To fix with glue, or to become unable to move. Irregular: stick, stuck, stuck. | The label will not stick properly. |
Stick earns its place because its past participle is everywhere in ordinary English: I am stuck covers a jammed door, a difficult exercise and being unable to leave a place. The verb also takes to for staying with a plan — stick to the timetable — which has nothing to do with glue.
Collocations that sound natural
Six everyday verbs that carry far more meaning inside phrases than they do alone. Each one below is used more often figuratively than literally in real British conversation.
spread
spread the newsspread butter on toastspread outa widespread problem
Irregular with no change at all: spread, spread, spread. It covers putting a soft substance over a surface and news travelling from person to person, and the adjective widespread joins up into one word.
pour
pour a drinkit is pouring with rainpour into the roompour money into
To make a liquid flow, and British English says it is pouring with rain where American English simply says it is pouring. The figurative pour money into means investing heavily, usually with a hint that it is not working.
shake
shake handsshake your headshake well before useshaken by the news
Irregular: shake, shook, shaken. Shake hands takes no article and is followed by with. Shaken as an adjective means emotionally upset, which is why news reports describe witnesses as shaken rather than shocked.
knock
knock on the doorknock it overknock somebody outa knock at the door
The door takes on in British English and at in the fixed noun phrase a knock at the door. Knock over means to make something fall, and knock out means either to make somebody unconscious or to eliminate them from a competition.
hang
hang up your coathang on a momenthang the washing outhang around
This verb has two past forms with different meanings: hung for objects and hanged only for executions. Hang on means wait, hang up ends a phone call, and hang around means to wait about with nothing to do.
dig
dig a holedig up the gardendig into the detailsdig your heels in
Irregular: dig, dug, dug. Dig up means to uncover, including information, and dig into means to examine closely. Dig your heels in means refusing to change your mind, and it is common in British reporting about negotiations.
Where each word belongs
Seven everyday verbs carrying a country, an extra sense or a level of formality. These are the words most likely to appear in a British conversation meaning something other than the dictionary definition.
- fetchBritish · and careful about peopleTo go somewhere, collect something and bring it back — one verb for what takes English three. It is entirely normal about objects and about dogs, but using it about a person can sound as though you are giving orders, so collect is safer there.
- gatherTwo senses · and a polite hedgeTo collect things together, or for people to come together in one place. Its second use is a formal hedge in conversation: I gather you have already met means somebody told me, and it is a very British way of introducing information politely.
- lowerFormal as a verb, ordinary as an adjectiveAs a verb it means to move something down and appears mostly in writing and instructions, where speech says put down. As an adjective and comparative it is completely ordinary: the lower shelf, lower prices.
- holdMany senses · and the phoneIrregular: hold, held, held. Beyond keeping something in your hand it means to contain, to organise and to keep a position. On the telephone hold on and please hold both mean wait, the second being the formal recorded version.
- kickEveryday · and two useful idiomsTo hit with the foot, and central to football vocabulary in kick off, which now also means any event starting. Kick somebody out means to expel them, and it is informal but extremely common in speech.
- spinTwo senses · one of them about newsTo turn quickly, and irregular: spin, spun, spun. The word also names the practice of presenting information to look favourable, which is why political spin and a spin doctor are standard terms in British journalism.
- rollVerb and noun · and a bread rollTo move by turning over, and to make something into a tube shape. As a noun British English uses it for a small round loaf, for a list of names, and for a cylinder of anything — so a roll of film and a bacon roll share nothing but the shape.
Sentences to try
Four frames in the past tense. Say each one, then put it into the present perfect to test the participle.
- He threw the ball and she caught it easily.
- I accidentally tore the page while turning it.
- They spread the map out on the table.
- She bent down to lift the box.
Questions about common actions vocabulary
What is the past tense of throw and tear?
Throw gives threw in the past simple and thrown as the past participle: He threw it, He has thrown it. Tear gives tore and torn: She tore the letter, The letter was torn. Both belong to the group of irregular verbs with three distinct forms, where the participle typically ends in -n. The same shape gives break, broke, broken, choose, chose, chosen, speak, spoke, spoken and know, knew, known.
Does "hit" change in the past tense?
No — hit is the same in the present, the past simple and the past participle: hit, hit, hit. So He hits the ball and Yesterday he hit the ball differ only by the time expression. A small group of English verbs behaves this way, including cut, put, let, set, cost, shut, hurt and spread. Because the form gives you no clue, the surrounding words carry the whole tense, which is worth watching for when you read.
How do you pronounce "tear"?
There are two different words spelled the same way. Tear meaning to rip rhymes with air and is irregular: tear, tore, torn. Tear meaning the drop of water from your eye rhymes with ear and is a regular countable noun: tears ran down her face. Pairs like this are called homographs, and English has a number of them — lead the metal against lead the verb, and read in the present against read in the past.