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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.
Note that since the preterite by nature refers to an event seen as having a beginning and an end, and not as a context, the use of the continuous form of the verb only adds a feeling for the length of time spent on the action. The future has two main forms in Spanish, the imperfect (compound) future and the simple one.
The verb ver in modern Spanish has a regular -er verb preterite (yo vi, tú viste, él vio – note the lack of written accent on monosyllables), but in archaic texts the irregular preterite forms yo vide, él vido, etc. are sometimes seen.
For other irregular verbs and their common patterns, see the article on Spanish irregular verbs. The tables include only the "simple" tenses (that is, those formed with a single word), and not the "compound" tenses (those formed with an auxiliary verb plus a non-finite form of the main verb), such as the progressive, perfect, and passive voice.
Spanish has a number of verb tenses used to express actions or states of being in a past time frame. The two that are "simple" in form (formed with a single word, rather than being compound verbs) are the preterite and the imperfect.
For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, and broke. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms.
The preterite forms of some irregular verbs had multiple variants until the 17th century. Thus, the verb traer 'to bring' could be conjugated truxe, truxo 'I brought, he brought', alongside modern traxe, traxo (now spelled with j and not x ). [32] The variants truje, trujo are still found in some predominantly rural nonstandard varieties. [33]
Excluding four common irregular verbs, the principal parts of all other English verbs are the infinitive, preterite and past participle. All forms of these English verbs can be derived from the three principal parts. Four verbs have an unpredictable 3rd person singular form and the verb "to be" is so irregular it has seven separate forms.