Generate a random verb from 260 common English verbs in infinitive form, filterable by word length -- for writing prompts, improv, grammar practice, and word games.
A verb is the word that says what happens -- an action (sprint, carve), an occurrence (rust, vanish), or a state (belong, resemble). It is the one part of speech an English sentence cannot do without, because the verb is what carries tense, and tense is what places the sentence in time. Verbs come in two broad shapes. Transitive verbs need an object to land on (she carved *the handle*); intransitive ones do not (the ship vanished). Most English verbs are regular and form their past with -ed, but the few hundred irregular ones -- go/went, catch/caught, sing/sang -- are among the most frequently used words in the language, which is why they survived the levelling that regularised everything else. Verbs are also the part of speech English most readily borrows into other roles: nearly every verb here can be used as a noun, and many as an adjective in -ing or -ed form.
This generator draws from 260 English verbs in their bare infinitive form -- no "to", no tense, no -ing. They are ordinary, physical, mostly picturable verbs rather than auxiliaries or abstractions, because a prompt built on "wander" or "carve" gives you somewhere to go and a prompt built on "have" does not. It is the verb slice of the site's word bank, with the part of speech pre-selected.
Every result here is drawn using crypto.getRandomValues() -- the Web Crypto API's cryptographically secure randomness -- instead of Math.random(), so it's genuinely unpredictable, not just statistically random. Learn more.
Improv and acting exercises (draw a verb, play the action), writing prompts that force movement into a scene, grammar drills on tense and conjugation, ESL practice with regular and irregular forms, charades, and the verb half of any "verb + noun" naming pattern.
Generate draws one verb at random from 260 using the site's cryptographically secure randomness, guaranteed to differ from whatever is currently on screen in single-result mode. The length filter cuts the pool to short (3-4 letters), medium (5-7) or long (8+) before the draw. Amounts up to 100 come back as a list, optionally with no duplicates.
A sample of what this generator can draw, spread evenly across the full list:
The bare infinitive -- "wander", not "to wander", "wandered" or "wandering". That is the form you conjugate from, so it is the useful one to be handed for a grammar exercise, and it is the form a dictionary lists.
Yes, mixed in with the regulars and not marked as such -- part of the point of drawing at random is not knowing in advance whether the past tense is going to be regular. Ask for a few at once and you will typically get a spread of both.
No. Auxiliaries and modals (be, have, do, can, will, should) are function words -- they carry grammar rather than meaning, and drawing one as a prompt gives you nothing to work with. Everything here is a lexical verb with a picture behind it.
Yes -- press the + button under the result to add the Random Noun Generator to the same page, then Generate all draws both at once. That is the fastest route to an action prompt, a band name, or an improv scene.
Noun · Adjective · Adverb · Sentence · Idiom · Proverb