Sneaking suspicion that irregular verbs tend to be one syllable

My take is that the older words of English fall into the pattern similar to the er/est comparative/superlative pattern. The dichotomy of English adjectives into er/est and more/most is an observation I first learned from Dr. Robin Barr at AU and which has also been noted here , in a posting from Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman.

blast from the past

You can see language change around us, epitomized by my late father's insistence that "tennis shoes" are "sneakers" that you sneak, sneaked, and have sneaked in. The rest of my family preferred to sneak around in tennis shoes ("trainers" for you Brits) that we sneak, snucked, and have snuck in. Dad was not the only insister, as per Grammarly : Some people frown upon snuck, so if you’re in doubt about which form to use, sneaked is always the safer option.

That piece treats the irregularizification of sneak into snuck as inexplicable, rather than a going-against-the-tide trend. In truth, the next generation is the one most willing to bond over sharing new words, or--in this case--a new take on an old word. Such is the state of things that my fav sites list both forms together.

Reverso's conjugator for "sneak" Infinitive to sneak | Preterite snuck/sneaked | Past participle snuck/sneaked

Webster's entry for "sneak" sneaked\ ˈsnēkt \ or snuck\ ˈsnək

Dear reader, you, too, can be part of the process because Google's dictionary flagged my use of snuck . With enough clicks to "Add to dictionary" we may one day see reverso and Webster's list the entry under "snuck" just long enough for the youth to innovate a regularization of it back into "sneaked." Here are the results in a nutshell. Snuck (in print, let alone in speech) is the product of periods of youthful rebellion! https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sneaked%2Csnuck&year_start=1929&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3

This references Arika Okrent's channel produced by Mental Floss and provides a fascinating and comprehensive account of irregular verbs: They were regular when the conjugation system was based on vowel change rather than the +ed ending. (Transcript)

Lists of irregular English verbs

QUIZ http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/verbs/5.htm

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/07/comparative-superlative.html
http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/irregulars.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs#List

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/grammar/irregular_verbs/index.html

https://www.gallaudet.edu/tutorial-and-instructional-programs/english-center/grammar-and-vocabulary/verbs/irregular-verb-list

https://pasttenses.com/irregular-verbs-list searchable for 638 verbs

For more ideas on language change as coming from the young, see https://duckduckgo.com/?q=slang+and+innovation+variationist+sociolinguistics+youth+innovate&t=h_&ia=web Please leave a comment that reviews one of these papers with your thoughts on the "snuckifaction" process, which turns regular verbs into irregular ones.