past tense

Definition

A grammatical form (often a verb form) that refers to an event, transaction, occurrence, or object that happened (or had happened), or existed, at some time before now (the applicable reference time).

Example Sentences

• "This is a report on a study of the use of the past tense forms in the 53 Japanese samples compiled for the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) project."
• "As you have studied Spanish, you have probably had the feeling that there are just too many past tenses."
• "Some members of the [Mongolic language] family have three or more different affixes which seem to be markers of the past tense, so that in Khalkha, for example, irev, irjee, irlee, and irsen all can translate, and be translated by, the English past tense verb came."