Verb Tenses! List of 12 tenses in English with useful grammar rules and examples, including past tense, present tense and future tense. Learn these English tenses with verb tenses chart to master grammar rules in English.
In the English language, tenses play an important role in sentence formation. The tense of a verb shows the time of an event or action.
The concept of time can be split into:
There are four types of verb tenses. Simple, Perfect, Continuous and Present Perfect Continuous and each of these has a present, past and future form.
In Simple Present, the action is simply mentioned and there is nothing being said about its completeness.
In Present Continuous, the action is on-going/ still going on and hence continuous.
In Present Perfect, the action is complete or has ended and hence termed Perfect.
In Present Perfect Continuous, the action has been taking place for some time and is still ongoing.
In Simple Past, the action is simply mentioned and understood to have taken place in the past.
In Past Continuous, the action was ongoing till a certain time in the past.
Past Perfect is used to express something that happened before another action in the past.
Past Perfect Continuous is used to express something that started in the past and continued until another time in the past.
Simple Future is used when we plan or make a decision to do something. Nothing is said about the time in the future.
The future continuous tense is used to express action at a particular moment in the future. However, the action will not have finished at the moment.
Future Perfect expresses an action that will occur in the future before another action in the future.
Future Perfect Continuous is used to talk about an on-going action before some point in the future.
