kevin dooley · BY · by
tense
Sign in to saveAlso known as verb tense, verb form, grammatical tense
category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place
Tense is a grammatical tool that places an action or state of being at a specific point in time, such as the past, present, or future. It matters because it allows speakers and writers to clearly communicate when something happened, is happening, or will happen.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Wikidata facts
Show 2 more facts
- exact match
- www.lexinfo.net/ontology/2.0/lexinfo#Tense
- Commons category
- Grammatical tenses
Sources (9)
via Wikidata · CC0
~25 min read
Article
In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture, while some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages; however, these languages do refer to time in different ways.
Available in 72 languages
- Español
- Français
- Deutsch
- 中文
- 日本語
- Русский
- Italiano
- العربية
- हिन्दी
- Afrikaans
- Albanian
- Armenian
- Asturian
- Bahasa Indonesia
- Bangla
- Bashkir
- Basque
- Belarusian
Show 53 more
- Breton
- Bulgarian
- Burmese
- Catalan
- Chuvash
- Czech
- Danish
- Esperanto
- Estonian
- Finnish
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Ido
- Irish
- Kazakh
- Kyrgyz
- Latin
- Latvian
- Lingua Franca Nova
- Lithuanian
- Low German
- Macedonian
- Malagasy
- Malayalam
- Nederlands
- Nepali
- Northern Sami
- Norwegian
- Norwegian Nynorsk
- Occitan
- Ossetic
- Polski
- Punjabi
- Romanian
- Santali
- Scottish Gaelic
- simple
- Sindhi
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Svenska
- Tajik
- Tamil
- Tiếng Việt
- Türkçe
- Ukrainian
- Walloon
- Wu Chinese
- zh_yue
- فارسی
- 한국어
via Wikidata sitelinks · CC0