The irregular verb To Go

The verb to go is irregular, and apart from be is the only suppletive verb in the English language.

The principal parts of the word are go, went, gone. Otherwise the modern English verb conjugates regularly. The irregularity of the principal parts results from the fact that they derive from two or possibly three different Indo-European roots. The preterite, (or 'simple past tense') in no way etymologically related to go, for went comes from wendan in Old English, which is also the source of wend. Old English wendan and gan (the latter of which means go) did share semantic similarities, and their similar meanings can be seen in the fact that the sentence "I'm wending my way home", means "I'm going home." Theories concerning the origin of gone are discussed below.

Origin of yede or eode

Old English didn't have the preterite went in any form, instead using the word eode, a word which has not left any trace in modern English in any form. When one looks at eode, in all its conjugated forms, it is not surprising to see all the d's, for these are the familiar Germanic dental suffixes, establishing eode as a preterite. The root itself, eo, came from the unattested Proto-Germanic *ijjôm. The Gothic form of this root is iddja, but this form hasn't produced any other attested root words in the other Germanic languages. *Ijjôm was itself a past tense form of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *yâ (go). Specifically, this root was either imperfect or aorist. (The aorist tense expressed momentary action in the past, while the imperfect, continual action in the past). *Yâ itself seems to have come from a PIE form *ei, î, and if this is correct, it would establish a link between the Old English Preterite for go and the Latin ire (go, pres inf.) (which is simply the î from *ei, î followed by a standard Latin infinitive ending, re). The OED does not discuss this, but the 4th Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary does in its appendix of PIE stems, drawing heavily on Julius Pokorny's Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (page 293). (ire is the source of many English words, words as disparate as introit, preterite, and ambition).