past tense

In grammar, the form a verb takes to express action in the past. The past tense of regular English verbs is formed by the addition of -ed (climb, climbed).

There are many irregular verbs, which form their past tenses in a variety of ways (buy, bought; shine, shone; keep, kept).

The past simple tense of to climb is ‘I climbed’; the past continuous is ‘I was climbing’; the past perfect is ‘I had climbed’.

There are also different types of construction expressing the past, with different shades of meaning: ‘He walked into the bar’ (simple past); ‘I had been there before’ (past perfect); ‘When I got up, the birds were singing’ (past continuous); ‘She should have been here sooner’.