Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Bygone; past.
- In grammar, expressing past time; past: applied especially to the tense which expresses past action or existence simply, without further implication as to continuousness, etc.: as, wrote is the preterit tense of write.
- n. Time past; the past.
- n. In grammar, the tense which signifies past time, or which expresses action or being as simply past or finished. Abbreviated preterit
Wiktionary
- n. alternative form of preterite.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Past; -- applied to a tense which expresses an action or state as past.
- adj. Belonging wholly to the past; passed by.
- n. The preterit; also, a word in the preterit tense.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a term formerly used to refer to the simple past tense
Examples
“As Nadelmann notes, it is now acceptable to admit pot smoking as preterit (thanks, Barack), a big step forward from the awkward half-admissions of the 1990s.”
“I'm french and I wouldn't know for sure, but why couldn't it be a preterit, as David above implied ?”
“This occurs especially in the present and preterit, i.e.”
“In my Donatus, quoth Friar John, I could find yet but three times or tenses, the preterit, the present, and the future; doubtless here the fourth ought to be a work of supererogation.”
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel
“The teachers tried to maintain their authority, and made it seem like they knew what they were talking about when they utilized pretentious verbiage and pompous diction in dissertation of the preterit occurences.”
“Present: expressed by lack of preterit suffix in verb; and by suffixed - s”
“The verbal forms in-_ara_ and-_iera_ were used then as now as the equivalent of the pluperfect or the preterit indicative.”
“In this Latinism the preterit denotes that a thing or condition that once existed no longer exists.”
“Moreover when they tell me, one tells me the word in the infinitive mood, another in the indicative; one in the first, another in the second person; one in the present, another in the preterit.”
“_ Particle, denoting recent past time, prefixed to form the proximate preterit tense.”
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