Simple past

This article is about an English tense form. For the comparable tense form in other languages, see Preterite.

The simple past, past simple, or past indefinite, in English equivalent to the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses.[1] Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however, there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms.[2]

The term "simple" is used to distinguish the syntactical construction whose basic form uses the plain past tense alone,[3] from other past tense constructions which use auxiliaries in combination with participles, such as the present perfect, past perfect, and past progressive.[4]

  1. ^ Comrie, Bernard (2006). Tense. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics (8. pr. 2004 transferred to digital printing 2006 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 41–43. ISBN 978-0-521-28138-6.
  2. ^ "Past simple". LearnEnglish - British Council. 2010-03-18. Retrieved 2024-01-04.
  3. ^ Aarts, Bas; Chalker, Sylvia; Weiner, Edmund S. C.; Weiner, E. S. C. (2014). The Oxford dictionary of English grammar. Oxford paperback reference (2. ed., [fully rev. and updated] ed.). Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-19-965823-7.
  4. ^ Comrie, Bernard (2001). Aspect: an introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics (Transferred to digital print ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-521-29045-6.