Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
English. In English, the past tense (or preterite) is one of the inflected forms of a verb. The past tense of regular verbs is made by adding -d or -ed to the base form of the verb, while those of irregular verbs are formed in various ways (such as see→saw, go→went, be→was/were). With regular and some irregular verbs, the past tense form ...
Now regularized in past tense and sometimes in past participle. must – (no other forms) Defective; originally a preterite. See English modal verbs: need (needs/need) – needed – needed: Weak, regular except in the use of need in place of needs in some contexts, by analogy with can, must, etc. [3] See English modal verbs: ought – (no ...
The past participle of regular verbs is identical to the preterite (past tense) form, described in the previous section. For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made).
A few verbs are regular in their spoken forms, but have irregular spelling. The irregular weak verbs (being in normal use) can consequently be grouped as follows: Verbs with vowel shortening: creep, flee, hear, keep, leap, shoe (when shod is used), sleep, sweep and weep. (Of these, creep, flee, leap, sleep and weep derive from verbs that were ...
Grammatical tense. In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. [1][2] Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and ...
The simple past or past simple, sometimes also called the preterite, consists of the bare past tense of the verb (ending in -ed for regular verbs, and formed in various ways for irregular ones, with the following spelling rules for regular verbs: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y ...
The word perfect in this sense means "completed" (from Latin perfectum, which is the perfect passive participle of the verb perficere "to complete"). In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated -verb form. Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of ...