past perfect tense
- noun
- /pæst ˈpɜrfɪkt tɛns/
- Specialized
:
pretérito pluscuamperfecto
- In the sentence 'She had left before I arrived,' the verb is in the past perfect tense.
Examples
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English learners often struggle to use the past perfect tense correctly in conversation.
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'Had finished' in 'I had finished my homework before dinner' is an example of the past perfect tense.
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The teacher explained the past perfect tense clearly.
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Have you learned about the past perfect tense yet?
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In the sentence "She had finished her homework before dinner," the phrase indicates the past perfect tense used to show an action completed before another time.
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The example "They had traveled to France before moving to Spain" illustrates the past perfect tense by indicating that the traveling occurred prior to the moving.
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An instance of the past perfect tense is found in the sentence "He had never seen the ocean until last summer," where the action of never seeing is before another past point.
Synonyms
1
9.1
A verb tense for an action completed before another past action
1
3.0
A verb tense that shows an action happened before another past action or time
1
8.9
A verb form showing one past action happened before another past action
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a verb tense used to express an action completed before another past action' is directly compositional from 'past' (events already happened) + 'perfect' (completed action) + 'tense' (verb time form). This is a standard grammatical naming pattern with clear cross-linguistic equivalents (e.g., Spanish pluscuamperfecto), so a learner who knows the constituent terms will readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Past perfect tense gives a simple picture: imagine two past moments, where the first action, the past, is complete and called the perfect because it finished 'before' the second. So it shows that one action was finished 'before' another action in the past.