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- Preterite: I went
- Present: I go
- Future: I will go
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FromMiddle Englishpreterit, fromOld Frenchpreterit (13th century), fromLatinpraeteritum (as intempus praeteritum(“time past”)), the past participle ofpraetereō(“I go by, go past”), itself frompraeter(“beyond, before, above, more than”) (comparative ofprae(“before”)) +itum (the past participle ofeō(“I go”)).
preterite (notcomparable)
- (grammar, of atense) Showing anaction at adetermined moment in thepast.
1913 [1856], Robert Caldwell, edited by J.L. Wyatt and T. Ramakrishna Pillai,A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian, or, South-Indian Family of Languages, 3rd edition, London: Kegan Paul,→OCLC, page496:The Dravidianpreterite tense is ordinarily formed, like the present, by annexing the pronominal signs to thepreterite verbal participle.
- Belongingwholly to the past; passed by.
1890,James Russell Lowell, “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago”, inThe Writings of James Russell Lowell, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,→OCLC, page52:Without leaving your elbow-chair, you shall go back with me thirty years, which will bring you among things and persons as thoroughlypreterite as Romulus or Numa.
1988, Clifford Geertz,Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, page19:Boas, Benedict, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Murdock, Evans-Pritchard, Griaule, Levi-Strauss, to keep the list short,preterite, and variegated,[…]
showing an action at a determined moment in the past
preterite (pluralpreterites)
- (grammar) A grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past.
1772, John Mair,A Radical Vocabulary, Latin and English, Edinburgh: A. Murray, and J. Cochran, for A. Kincaid & W. Creech, and J. Bell,→OCLC, page101:When simple verbs redouble thepreterite, the compounds drop the first syllable, as: Pello, pĕpŭli,to drive away,to beat back; Repello, rĕpŭli,and not rĕpĕpŭli,to drive back,to repel.
1994, Dieter Stein, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade,Towards a Standard English: 1600-1800, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,→ISBN, page115:Nevertheless, a small amount of variation still exists in one area of standard English verbal morphology: thepreterite and past participle forms of certain irregular verbs.
preterite tense; simple past
Translations to be checked
preterite
- second-personsingular voseoimperative ofpreterir combined withte
