Transitive and Intransitive Verb Activities

Verbs are essential for expressing actions and ideas, making it important to understand how to use them accurately. On this page, we will explore transitive and intransitive verbs and use transitive and intransitive verb activities to enhance your language skills.

What Are Transitive and Intransitive Verbs?

Verbs can either be transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs must have a direct object to complete the thought. Intransitive verbs do not have a direct object.

Transitive Verbs

In order for us to understand transitive verbs, it’s important for us to know what a direct object is. For this reason, let’s start by reviewing what a direct object is.

Direct Object

A direct object is the person or thing that receives the action from the subject. Take this sentence for example: She drinks orange juice for breakfast. The action is ‘drink’, and it’s the orange juice that is receiving that action. The direct object in this sentence is ‘orange juice’. Because ‘drinks’ it requires a direct object to complete its meaning, it is a transitive verb.

Let’s take a look at two more examples. In each of the following, the action of the verb moves from the subject, through the verb, to the direct object. For this reason, ‘melted’ and ‘made’ are transitive verbs.

Now let’s get back to transitive and intransitive verbs. As mentioned above, transitive verbs must have a direct object. To illustrate this, let’s remove the direct objects from the three sentences we have looked at so far. You will notice that these sentences are incomplete without the direct object. Transitive verbs must have a direct object to complete the thought.

Intransitive Verbs

Some sentences don’t have a direct object, because not all verbs need a direct object. Verbs that don’t need a direct object are called intransitive verbs. Take this example: ‘The girl fell.’ There is no direct object to receive the action (fell). The action is not passed on to a direct object, because there is no direct object. ‘Fell’ an intransitive verb because it does not require a direct object to complete its meaning.

Let’s take a look at three more examples. Notice that in each of the following sentence, the action from the verb is not passed on to a direct object. For this reason, the verbs ‘smiled’, ‘laughed’ and ‘jumped’ in the following sentences are intransitive.

Sometimes objects are confused with prepositional phrases or time phrases. Take a look at the third sentence, ‘He jumped over the fence.’ In this case, over the fence is a prepositional phrase describing where he jumped, not what he jumped. There is no object receiving the action because jump is an intransitive verb here. Remember, a direct object answers the question ‘what’ or ‘whom’ after the verb. In this example, if you ask, ‘He jumped what?’ there is no answer, which confirms there is no direct object.

Transitive or Intransitive Trick

To help us recognise whether a verb is transitive or intransitive, we can ask the question ‘what?’ or ‘whom?’ after the verb. If the sentence provides a clear answer to these questions, the verb is transitive because it has a direct object. If there is no answer or the sentence doesn’t need one to make sense, the verb is intransitive. Let’s take a look at that in practice:

The chef cut the vegetables.
What did the chef cut? The vegetables. We can recognise that “cut” is transitive because it has an object (the vegetables) next to it.

Now, let’s look at another example:
The baby smiled.
What did the baby smile? There is no direct answer to the question, which means the verb is intransitive. It does not require a direct object to express its full meaning.

It’s important to remember that some verbs can function as both transitive and intransitive, depending on how they are used. Here’s an example:
Marco runs every day. → Intransitive.
Marco runs a marathon. → Transitive.

Video 1: Transitive and Intransitive Verbs

Video 2: Direct Objects

Video 3: Indirect Objects

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