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The preterite or preterit (/ ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense.
The preterite and past participle forms of irregular verbs follow certain patterns. These include ending in -t (e.g. build , bend , send ), stem changes (whether it is a vowel, such as in sit , win or hold , or a consonant, such as in teach and seek , that changes), or adding the [ n ] suffix to the past participle form (e.g. drive , show , rise ).
The past participle of regular verbs is identical to the preterite (past tense) form, described in the previous section. For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs . Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung ); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made ).
For example, bore and found may be past tenses of bear and find, but may also represent independent (regular) verbs of different meaning. Another example is lay , which may be the past tense of lie , but is also an independent verb (regular in pronunciation, but with irregular spelling: lay–laid–laid ).
The simple past or past simple, sometimes also called the preterite, consists of the bare past tense of the verb (ending in -ed for regular verbs, and formed in various ways for irregular ones, with the following spelling rules for regular verbs: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y ...
This is generally considered to be the situation with regular English verbs – from the one principal part, namely the plain form of a regular verb (the bare infinitive, such as play, happen, skim, interchange, etc.), all the other inflected forms (which in English are not numerous; they consist of the third person singular present tense, the ...
The leveling comes in with the fact that the other tenses match one or the other of the tenses. In this case, the infinitive/present and preterite plural tenses follow the past participle and use the vowel "i". German and Dutch follow a different pattern, in that the vowels of the preterite singular and past participle are kept the same.
Examples which combine both types of tense marking include the French passé composé, which has an auxiliary verb together with the inflected past participle form of the main verb; and the Irish past tense, where the proclitic do (in various surface forms) appears in conjunction with the affixed or ablaut-modified past tense form of the main verb.