Many ditransitive verbs have a passive voice form which can take a direct object.

The patient of a ditransitive verb is treated separately and called secondary object.

In English "to give" and "to lend" are typical ditransitive verbs.

An example with the ditransitive verb "show" (literally: "make see") is given below:

They are called ditransitive verbs.

There is a different kind of ditransitive verb, where the two objects are semantically an entity and a quality, a source and a result, etc.

And the following idioms involving a ditransitive verb include the second object at the same time that the first object is free:

It has obligatory polyagreement on all verbs with subject and object, though not with the theme of a ditransitive verb.

In grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient.

Ditransitive verbs have two arguments other than the subject: a theme that undergoes the action and a recipient that receives the theme (see thematic role).

The indirect object of ditransitive verbs, however, can be in the dative, locative, allative, or with some verbs also in the absolutive.

A dechticaetiative language is a language in which the indirect objects of ditransitive verbs are treated like the direct objects of monotransitive verbs.

A mysterious property of shifting is that in the case of ditransitive verbs, a shifted direct object prevents extraction of the indirect object via wh-movement:

Not all languages have a passive voice, and some that do have one (e.g. Polish) don't allow the indirect object of a ditransitive verb to be promoted to subject by passivization, as English does.

In a dechticaetiative language, the recipient of a ditransitive verb is treated in the same way as the single object of a monotransitive verb, and this syntactic category is called primary object.

Similarly, some Transitive Animate verbs inflect for a secondary object, forming ditransitive verbs, termed Double Object Transitive: nkəmó tə ma n 'I stole it from him.'

In Urdu and Hindi, the ergative case is marked on agents in the preterite and perfect tenses for transitive and ditransitive verbs, while in other situations agents appear in the nominative case.

English has a number of generally ditransitive verbs, such as give, grant, and tell and many transitive verbs that can take an additional argument (commonly a beneficiary or target of the action), such as pass, read, bake, etc.:

In practice, many languages (including English) interpret the category more flexibly, allowing: ditransitive verbs, verbs that have two objects; or even ambitransitive verbs, verbs that can be used as both a transitive verb and an intransitive verb.

Just as the way the arguments of intransitive and transitive verbs are aligned in a given language allows one sort of typological classification, the morphosyntactic alignment between arguments of monotransitive and ditransitive verbs allows another kind of classification.

In languages which mark grammatical case, it is common to differentiate the objects of a ditransitive verb using, for example, the accusative case for the direct object, and the dative case for the indirect object (but this morphological alignment is not unique; see below).