Editing Past (section)

== Grammar ==
{{main|Past tense}}
[[File:The Cosmic Calendar Concept – deep time and cosmic history as one year (time-lapse and annotations).gif|thumb|upright=1.5|Sometimes, the past is visualized by scaling a fraction or all of the past to a time-span people are more familiar with. In the case of [[Cosmic Calendar]]s, the [[chronology of the universe]], including the [[history of Earth]], is compressed onto a single [[year]].<ref>{{cite web |title=Entire Universe in 1 Year |url=https://starwalk.space/en/infographics/entire-universe-in-1-year |website=Star Walk |access-date=31 March 2025 |language=en |date=11 April 2022}}</ref>]]
In English [[grammar]], actions are classified according to one of the following twelve verb tenses: past (past, [[Uses of English verb forms#Past progressive/continuous|uses of English verb forms]], [[past perfect]], or [[past perfect continuous]]), present ([[present]], [[present continuous]], [[present perfect]], or [[present perfect continuous]]), or future ([[future]], [[future continuous]], [[future perfect]], or [[future perfect continuous]]).<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web |title=Verb tenses |url=https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/verb-tenses |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180626030737/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/verb-tenses |archive-date=26 June 2018 |access-date=25 June 2018 |website=English Oxford Living Dictionaries |publisher=Oxford University Press}}</ref> The past tense refers to actions that have already happened. For example, "she is walking" refers to a girl who is currently walking (present tense), while "she walked" refers to a girl who was walking before now (past tense).

The past continuous tense refers to actions that continued for a period of time, as in the sentence "she was walking," which describes an action that was still happening in a prior window of time to which a speaker is presently referring. The past perfect tense is used to describe actions that were already completed by a specific point in the past. For example, "she had walked" describes an action that took place in the past and was also completed in the past.

The past perfects continuous tense refers to an action that was happening up until a particular point in the past but was completed.<ref name="auto1" /> It is different from the past perfect tense because the emphasis of past perfect continuous verbs is not on the action having been completed by the present moment, but rather on its having taken place actively over a time period before another moment in the past. The verb tense used in the sentence "She had been walking in the park regularly before I met her" is past perfect continuous because it describes an action ("walking") that was actively happening before a time when something else in the past was happening (when "I met her").

Depending on its usage in a sentence, "past" can be described using a variety of terms. [[Synonyms]] for "past" as an [[adjective]] include, "former," "bygone," "earlier," "preceding," and "previous." Synonyms for "past" as a [[noun]] include, "history, "background," "life story," and "biography." Synonyms of "past" as a [[preposition]] include, "in front of," "beyond," "by," and "in excess of."<ref>{{Cite web |title=past |url=https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/past |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180827210109/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/past |archive-date=27 August 2018 |access-date=27 August 2018 |website=oxforddictionaries.com |publisher=English Oxford Living Dictionaries |format=Web}}</ref>