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Spanish verb conjugation: haber

 Spanish verbs index

The verb haber means "to have" as in the auxiliary used to form compound tenses such as the perfect tense: he comido = I have eaten.

• haber has a largely irregular perfect tense;
• The future and conditional are formed on the stem habr-;
• The present subjunctive is irregular, formed on the stem hay-;
• The preterite is irregular, formed on the stem hub-, and being one of few verbs not to have the stressed vowel on the beginning of the preterite ending.

Existential use

The third person forms of this verb are used in an existential construction. In this case, the present tense form is hay: hay... = there is/are...; hubo... = there was/were.... In some dialects, the plural form is used with a plural complement (habían... = there were...), but this usage is generally considered non-standard.

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