tense
n. countablen. a grammar category that shows when an action happens. You use it to explain whether an event took place in the past, is happening right now, or will happen in the future.
n. a grammatical category that expresses time reference relative to the moment of speaking. It is typically manifested through specific verb forms or conjugation patterns.
The teacher asked us to write the sentence in the past tense.
When telling a story about your childhood, you should keep your verbs in the past tense so the listener understands when it happened.
English is often described as having only two morphological tenses—past and non-past—while future time is expressed through modal auxiliaries rather than inflectional endings.
From Middle English tens, from Old French tens (modern French temps), from Latin tempus. Doublet of tempo and tempus.
Borrowed from Latin tēnsus, one form of the past participle of tendō (“stretch”).
Frequently collocates with the preposition 'in' ('in the past tense') and is modified by time adjectives like 'past', 'present', or 'future'.