preterite
adjEtymology
From Middle English preterit, from Old French preterit (13th century), from Latin praeteritum (as in tempus praeteritum (“time past”)), the past participle of praetereō (“to go by, go past”), itself from praeter (“beyond, before, above, more than”) (comparative of prae (“before”)) + itum (the past participle of eō (“to go”)).
- derived from praeteritum
- derived from preterit
- inherited from preterit
Definitions
Showing an action at a determined moment in the past.
- The Dravidian preterite tense is ordinarily formed, like the present, by annexing the pronominal signs to the preterite verbal participle.
Belonging wholly to the past
Belonging wholly to the past; passed by.
- Without leaving your elbow-chair, you shall go back with me thirty years, which will bring you among things and persons as thoroughly preterite as Romulus or Numa.
- Boas, Benedict, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Murdock, Evans-Pritchard, Griaule, Levi-Strauss, to keep the list short, preterite, and variegated, […]
A grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were…
A grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past.
- When simple verbs redouble the preterite, 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.
- Nevertheless, a small amount of variation still exists in one area of standard English verbal morphology: the preterite and past participle forms of certain irregular verbs.
The neighborhood
Derived
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for preterite. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA