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The preterite or preterit (/ ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense.
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 ).
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 also serves as a past participle. For full details of past tense formation, see English verbs.
The preterite and past participle forms of irregular verbs follow certain patterns. These include ending in -t (e.g. build, bend, send), stem changes (whether it is a vowel, such as in sit, win or hold, or a consonant, such as in teach and seek, that changes), or adding the [n] suffix to the past participle form (e.g. drive, show, rise ...
The verb wit is the only non-modal verb that is also a preterite-present verb and it does not take -s in the third person. It also has a vowel shift in the present tense as in "I wot". For shortened forms of certain verbs and of their negations (' s, ' re, won't, etc.), see English auxiliaries and contractions.
Regular verbs form the simple past end-ed; however there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms. [2] The spelling rules for forming the past simple of regular verbs are as follows: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y change to -ied (e.g. study – studied) and verbs ending in a group of a consonant + a vowel + a ...
They are formed using the finite verb in its preterite (simple past) form. [2] Certain uses of the past tense may be referred to as subjunctives; however the only distinction in verb conjugation between the past indicative and past subjunctive is the possible use of were in the subjunctive in place of was. For details see English subjunctive.
After went became established as the preterite of go, wend took on a new preterite, wended. In Northern English and Scots, yede was gaed, regularly formed by suffixing -ed to a variant of go. Due to the influence of the region, southern English forms constitute the standard language of England, and so went is the standard English preterite.