Other forms: goes, going, went, gone
Go is the plainest word English has for leaving where you are. You go to work, go to bed, go upstairs for a jumper; the bus goes at ten past, and the last train goes at midnight.
Its past tense is borrowed from a different verb entirely, and gone is the third form, which is where learners get caught: she has been to Rome means she came back, she has gone to Rome means she is still there. Go plus an adjective makes a change, and the change is nearly always for the worse — milk goes sour, bread goes stale, hair goes grey, machines go wrong. It also asks how something turned out, as in how did the interview go, and it takes a small army of particles that all mean different things: go on, go off, go out, go over, go through with it. As a noun a go is a turn or an attempt: it is your go, have a go, and somebody busy all day is on the go. With a capital letter, Go is a board game of black and white stones on a grid, where the aim is to surround territory.
1verbgoTo move from here to another place.~90%
“We go to the market on Saturdays.”
2verbbecomeTo become — used with an adjective, mostly for changes nobody wanted.~4%
“The milk has gone sour.”
3verbhappenTo happen or turn out in a particular way.~3%
“How did the interview go?”
4noungameA turn, or an attempt at something.~3%
“It is your go.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 29 of them on a sense (111 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Go once had a past tense of its own: yode. In the fifteenth century English dropped it and took the past of a different verb, wend — as in to wend your way — and went has been sitting in go's place ever since. The board game is a separate word altogether: Japanese go, from a Chinese name meaning the encirclement board game.
Middle English
gon
English, today
go
From Middle English gon. From Middle English gon, goon, from Old English gān (“to go”), from Proto-West Germanic gān, from Proto-Germanic gāną (“to go”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰeh₁- (“to leave”). The inherited past tense form yode (compare Old English ēode) was replaced through suppletion in the 15th century by went, from Old English wendan (“to go, depart, wend”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA