200 Verb Patterns: Gerund or Infinitive, and When It Changes the Meaning

Nothing in enjoy explains the -ing and nothing in want explains the to. The pattern is a property of the individual verb, like its spelling, and anybody offering you a rule here is selling something that breaks on the tenth example. So this book does the honest thing: it sorts two hundred verbs into their patterns, puts them in meaning groups so they are easier to hold, and writes the pattern into the headword - enjoy doing, decide to do, ask somebody to do - so the shape travels with the word.

Six parts: the four patterns, the two big families, the sentences with two people in them, the thirty-odd verbs that take both forms, and everything else that can sit in front of a verb.

Part 5 is why the book exists. I stopped smoking and I stopped to smoke describe opposite lives, both are correct English, and nobody will ever correct you. A back-page table sets out all eight of those verbs side by side.