In grammar, expressing past time; past: applied especially to the tense which expresses past action or existence simply, without further implication as to continuousness, etc.: as, wrote is the preterit tense of write.
noun Time past; the past.
noun In grammar, the tense which signifies past time, or which expresses action or being as simply past or finished. Abbreviated preterit
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun (Gram.) The preterit; also, a word in the preterit tense.
adjective (Gram.) Past; -- applied to a tense which expresses an action or state as past.
adjective rare Belonging wholly to the past; passed by.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun US Alternative form of preterite.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun a term formerly used to refer to the simple past tense
Etymologies
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Examples
As Nadelmann notes, it is now acceptable to admit pot smoking as preterit (thanks, Barack), a big step forward from the awkward half-admissions of the 1990s.
In my Donatus, quoth Friar John, I could find yet but three times or tenses, the preterit, the present, and the future; doubtless here the fourth ought to be a work of supererogation.
In my Donatus, quoth Friar John, I could find yet but three times or tenses, the preterit, the present, and the future; doubtless here the fourth ought to be a work of supererogation.
The teachers tried to maintain their authority, and made it seem like they knew what they were talking about when they utilized pretentious verbiage and pompous diction in dissertation of the preterit occurences.
Moreover when they tell me, one tells me the word in the infinitive mood, another in the indicative; one in the first, another in the second person; one in the present, another in the preterit.
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