Past Time Verbs

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First Published on the 31s of December, 2020 by Patrick Carpen.

Last updated: January 1, 2021 at 0:42 am

Yes, you read that right, and no, I didn’t mean past “tense” verbs. I mean exactly that: past time verbs. That’s because there are three different tenses of verbs which describe actions of the past: the simple past, past continuous (also called past progressive) and the past perfect tense.

The Simple Past Tense

The simple past tense of a verb describes an action which started and completed at some time in the past. Example:

I washed my clothes yesterday.

The rain fell yesterday.

The Past Continuous Tense

The past continuous tense of a verb describes an action that “was taking place” in the past but that did not have a definite completion. Here is an example:

I was playing in the backyard yesterday when you came.

As you can see from the example above, someone was playing, but the act of playing was ongoing without a defined conclusion.

Here’s another example:

I was washing clothes yesterday when the rain started to fall.

Washing clothes = past continuous

Started to fall = simple past.

The past continuous tense is formed by taking the present tense form of a verb and adding “ing” to it. It also needs the helping verb “was” or “were.”

The Past Perfect Tense

The past perfect tense describes an action that took place prior to an action in the simple past. Here is an example.

Last Saturday, I visited a beautiful city. I took my camera with me. I had bought my camera the year before on Amazon.

The first two sentences above are simple past, but the third is past perfect. That is, it describes an action that “had been perfected” before an action which took place in the past. In other words, the author of the passage above “had bought” the camera one year before he went on the trip. The story of the trip was written in the simple past, but the past perfect is needed to allude to an action which “had taken place” even before that time of visiting the city.

The past perfect tense is formed by using the helping verb “had” and the past particle of a verb.

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