EVOLVE Educational Vocational Objective Learning of Vernacular English

Transitive and Intransitive Verbs

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1)
Tran-sit [tran-sit, -zit] noun, verb, -sit-ed, -sit-ing.

1.	the act or fact of passing across or through; passage from one place to another.

2.	conveyance or transportation from one place to another, as of persons or goods, esp., local public transportation: city transit.

Transitive and intransitive are derived from transit and understanding this will help you to understand the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. Look at the verbs in these examples:

The police caught the criminal

The cat slept

The first sentence follows the subject verb object construction, where the verb caught ‘passes’ from the police to the criminal. The second sentence is more like a clause (a noun + a verb phrase) and the verb does not ‘pass’ anywhere.

Transitive Verbs (vt)
As we have seen, these verbs ‘pass’ from the subject to the object, it is impossible to say The police caught with any meaning – What did they catch? An innocent man? A cold? A bus?

Here are some more examples:

I took my medicine

They wanted more money

He bought some groceries

Erica smashed the window

We ripped the paper

Intransitive Verbs (vi)
These verbs do not necessarily have an object – they do not ‘pass’ onto another noun. We cannot add a noun to The cat slept – it makes no sense to say The cat slept the table.

Here are some more examples:

The little girl cried

They sneezed

The wind blew

The penny dropped

The truck crashed

To check whether a verb is intransitive, the question you should ask yourself is ‘Do I verb? Or do I verb something?’ for example ‘Do I knock? Or do I knock something?’ The answer is that you knock a door – therefore knock is transitive.

This test works if you consider whether the word after the verb is a noun, look at this example:

I went to work last week

Most people would say that went is transitive BUT there is no real noun in this sentence – to work is a prepositional phrase and last week is an adverb of time – went is intransitive.

Be careful! Some verbs can be both transitive and intransitive. Whenever you look a verb up in most dictionaries you will see it denoted as vt or vi.

Task
Put these verbs into the correct group in the box, use a dictionary to help you.

Transitive	Intransitive
run      feed on       follow      occur      exist      feed       happen       develop        evolve        buy        eat          sell      throw         live           raise       steal      bring      ache