Complete Tenses

Telling Time with Verbs

Verb tense is our primary tool for navigating time in language. It allows us to distinguish between what is happening now, what happened before, and what will happen later. But English is more complex than just past, present, and future. We also need to express whether an action is ongoing (continuous), completed before a point in time (perfect), or ongoing up to a point (perfect continuous). This chapter presents the complete map of these tenses, showing how they all relate to each other.

Tense is the form of a verb that shows the time and the state (ongoing or completed) of an action.