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Here are some examples:

  • In English , the past tense of the verb ''go'' is ''went'', which comes from the past tense of the verb ''wend'', archaic in this sense. (The modern past tense of ''wend'' is ''wended''.) There is also a suppletive use of the perfect tense of ''be'' to distinguish an experiential sense ("He has been to France") from a resultative sense ("He has gone to France").


  • The Romance Languages have a variety of suppletive forms in conjugating the verb "to go", as these first-person singular forms illustrate:

    • :The sources of these are 5 different Latin verbs:

:#''vadere'' "to advance"
:#''ire'' "to go"
:#''ambulare'' "to walk" (sometimes claimed to be the source of Spanish ''andar'' "to walk")
:#''allatus'' suppletive participle of ''afferre'' "to carry"
:#''fui'' suppletive perfective of ''esse'' "to be" (the Preterite s of "to be" and "to go" are identical in Spanish).

Many of the Romance languages use forms from different verbs in the present tense; for example, French has ''je vais'', "I go", (from ''vadere'') but ''nous allons'' "we go", (from ''ambulare'').


:† This is an adverbial form ("badly"); the Italian adjective is itself suppletive (''cattivo,'' from the same root as "captive").

  • Similarly to the Italian noted above, the English adverb form of "good" is the unrelated word "well," from Old English ''wel'', cognate to ''wyllan'' "to wish."


  • In English, the complicated ''---bhu-''; ''am'', ''is'' and ''are'' from ''---es-'', and ''was'' and ''were'' from ''---wes-''. This verb is suppletive in most IE languages. See Indo-European Copula .


  • An incomplete suppletion in English exists with the plural of ''person'' (from the Latin ''persona''). The regular plural ''persons'' occurs mainly in legalistic use. The singular of the unrelated noun ''people'' (from Latin ''populus'') is more commonly used in place of the plural, e.g. "two people were living on a one-person salary" (note the plural verb). In its original sense of "ethnic group", ''people'' is itself a singular noun with regular plural ''peoples''.