Thank you Zanzibar.
BTW My comment was in no way meant as an attack on anyone and if it was perceived as such I apologise. I just thought that as many of the posters here do not speak English natively it was worth pointing out one of the trickier aspects of the language that is different than many other languages. Getting the tense of verbs is something that many native speakers of English get wrong from time to time.
What does I won Z? 
And yes I intentionally used the wrong tense in the previous sentence.
What do you win ... hmmmm ... nothing because you didn't figure out the riddle.
As for pointing out that "some" players in this community do not speak english as a first language (I am not going to claim I know how many speak english and how many don't here because I don't think anyone truly knows the percentage) .... well I know that. Kind of a common sense thing. This Riddle I posted was from an english class I took in high school and has been a favorite of mine for a long time. I posted it because of that. I didn't really worry about the non speaking english members of this community because this riddle is also all over the net and it is easy to look up the answer. So I really don't see a problem here. I also don't think this is a thread that was meant to get into a debate about different languages, how certain things should be said, spelled, typed ... whatever .. but did I miss something?
* zorbels looks at the title
Nope it is a riddle thread. I guess I didn't miss something. Anyway, back to the topic .....
It's
1. Startling
2. Starling
3. staring
4. string
5. sting
6. sing
7. sin
8. in
9. I
Ta-da!

Yay! Congratulations emeraldfool, you have it correct. I find it quite neat that one word can hold so many.