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Ever wonder why 'go' becomes 'went'? It comes from an old past tense of 'wend', a Germanic word meaning 'turn' or 'proceed', which otherwise survives only in the fossilized phrase 'wend one's way'. 1/3 #etymology
In the 15C–16C, 'went' supplanted existing past-tense forms of 'go'. Texts of this time can have both, e.g. Wycliffe's Bible: 'Thei ȝeden out, and wenten in to the swyne.' The past tense of 'wend', meanwhile, became 'wended' 2/3
Wend–went was in a cluster of verbs with the same pattern: bend–bent, lend–lent, rend–rent, send–sent… Even when English looks irregular, it's often being locally regular – like the emergence of dive→dove by analogy with drive→drove & co. 3/3
