State Verbs

State verbs describe states rather than actions. We usually don’t use them in continuous tenses.
The interface seems very intuitive.
The interface is seeming very intuitive.
This coffee tastes really good!
This coffee is tasting really good!

– Verbs of feeling/wanting
like, love, dislike, hate, prefer, need, want, wish
(HOWEVER, we often use enjoy in the continuous)
I love writing code but I hate debugging it.
Are you enjoying the film?

– Verbs of thinking/believing
believe, doubt, forget, know, mean, realise, recognise, remember, think, understand
Do you know the answer?
We don’t believe this functionality is really necessary.

– verbs of being/appearing
appear, be, seem
There appears to be an error in the code.
Hannah seems to be very helpful.

– Verbs of processing/relating
belong, contain, have got, own, possess
Mark owns two cars.
The database contains a lot of sensitive information.

– Sense verbs
hear, see, smell, taste
Do you smell that? Someone’s baking a pie!
I didn’t see any bugs in the code.