Past Tense

What is the past tense?

The past tense is used to indicate actions that took place in the past. Depending on how it is formed, the past tense can indicate actions that were completed, were ongoing, or continued up until the present time. There are four forms of the past tense that are used to accomplish these tasks. These forms will be summarized briefly below, with more detailed information available in dedicated sections.

Past Simple Tense

The past simple tense is used to indicate actions that have been completed in the past. It’s also known as the simple past tense, and it doesn’t require any auxiliary verbs to be formed. The structure is only the past-tense form of the verb. The only exception is when we use it in a question or negative form, where we need to add the auxiliary verb “did” before the subject.

Examples

• “I went to the park yesterday.”
• “I did not eat the cookie.”
• “I called my sister over an hour ago, but she didn’t call back.”
• “Did they mow the lawn yet?”
• “What did you wear last night?”

Past Continuous Tense

The past continuous tense, also known as the past progressive, is used to express an action that was in progress at a specific point in the past and either finished in the past or continued until the present moment. It gets its name from the use of the past tense of the auxiliary verb “be” (was or were) along with the present participle of the main verb, which is used to describe an ongoing action.

Examples

• “We were working on our assignment when our parents came home.”
• “The phone rang as they were leaving.”
• “She was still writing her thesis at 2 o’clock in the morning.”
• “My roommates were fighting all the time, so I decided to move out.”
• “His memory was fading as he got older.”
• “Sorry I’m so muddy; I was working in the garden.”

Past Perfect Tense

The past perfect tense is used to express that an action took place before another action or specific point in the past. It is formed by using the past tense of the auxiliary verb “have” (had) and the past participle of the main verb. This tense is often used with conjunctions such as “before,” “when,” “because,” “until,” or “by the time” to indicate the order in which events occurred in the past.

Examples:

• “The film had already ended when I switched on the TV.”
• “Unfortunately, he had left his keys in the house when he left.”
• “Construction had gone smoothly until the earthquake hit.”
• “I hadn’t dreamed of living in Ireland before I visited the country.”
• “Had you ever ridden on a tractor before working on the farm?”
• “What had you done that forced you to move abroad?”

Past Perfect Continuous Tense

The past perfect continuous tense (also known as the past perfect progressive tense) is used to indicate an action that began in the past and continued until another past event occurred. To form this tense, we use “had been” along with the present participle of the main verb. This emphasizes the duration of the action that took place before the other event in the past.

Examples

• “We had been waiting for a long time before the bus finally came.”
• “I had been working on the ranch for more than half my life when I retired.”
• “I’d been cleaning all day, so I was too tired to go out last night.”
• “She had been traveling around Europe when she heard about her mother’s illness.”
• “He hadn’t been feeling well, so he went to lie down.”
• “I was covered in mud as I’d been digging in the back yard.”
• “He needed to study harder, because he hadn’t been doing very well on his exams.”
• “Where had you been staying at the time of the incident?”

The Subjunctive Mood

So far, we’ve seen examples of the past tense being used to describe what did or did not actually happen. This is known as the Indicative Mood.

However, we can also use the past tense to describe hypothetical scenarios, conditions, and desires—this is known as the subjunctive mood, one of the Irrealis Moods in English.

Expressing Wishes

We generally use one of the past tenses to describe a wish or desire for a hypothetical alternative, even if it is for something in the present or the future.

For example:

• “I wish it weren’t Monday.”
• “I wish I hadn’t agreed to work on Sunday.”
• “We both wish you weren’t moving to Europe for college.”

Conditional Sentences

We can also use the different past tenses to create conditional sentences, which describe possible (but unreal) outcomes based on hypothetical conditions. For example:

• “If I won the lottery, I would buy a new house.”
• “If you were older, you could stay up as late as you want.”
• “If I didn’t live in London, I could never speak English so well.”
• “If she had been there, she could have helped you.”
• “What might you have done had you known the truth?”
• “Had you been listening, you would have heard that the report was needed on Monday.”
• “I might have lost my job if my brother hadn’t been working in the head office at the time.”

Go to the sections related to the subjunctive mood if you want to learn more about using the past tense to describe hypothetical actions, events, and situations.