Editing Simple past (section)

{{short description|Basic form of the past tense in Modern English}}
{{About|an English tense form|the comparable tense form in other languages|Preterite}}
The '''simple past''', '''past simple''', or '''past indefinite''', in English equivalent to the [[preterite]], is the basic form of the [[past tense]] in [[Modern English]]. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Comrie |first=Bernard |title=Tense |date=2006 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-28138-6 |edition=8. pr. 2004 transferred to digital printing 2006 |series=Cambridge textbooks in linguistics |location=Cambridge |pages=41 - 43}}</ref> Regular English verbs form the simple past in ''-ed''; however, there are a few hundred [[List of English irregular verbs|irregular verbs]] with different forms.<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |date=2010-03-18 |title=Past simple |url=https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-grammar-reference/past-simple |access-date=2024-01-04 |website=LearnEnglish - British Council |language=en}}</ref>

The term "[[simple aspect|simple]]" is used to distinguish the [[syntax|syntactical]] construction whose basic form uses the plain past tense alone,<ref>{{Cite book |last=Aarts |first=Bas |title=The Oxford dictionary of English grammar |last2=Chalker |first2=Sylvia |last3=Weiner |first3=Edmund S. C. |last4=Weiner |first4=E. S. C. |date=2014 |publisher=Oxford Univ. Press |isbn=978-0-19-965823-7 |edition=2. ed., [fully rev. and updated] |series=Oxford paperback reference |location=Oxford}}</ref> from other past tense constructions which use auxiliaries in combination with participles, such as the [[present perfect]], [[past perfect]], and [[past progressive]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Comrie |first=Bernard |title=Aspect: an introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems |date=2001 |publisher=Cambridge Univ. Press |isbn=978-0-521-29045-6 |edition=Transferred to digital print |series=Cambridge textbooks in linguistics |location=Cambridge}}</ref>