past tense
"past-tense" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“past tense” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A grammatical form (often a verb form) that refers to an event, transaction, occurrence, or object that happened (or had happened), or existed, at some time before now (the applicable reference time).
Corpus desk
Index EN-past-tense · past tense · English
past tense · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "P" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | past tense |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “past tense” in English
Rare enough to double-check
past tense is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A grammatical form (often a verb form) that refers to an event, transaction, occurrence, or object that happened (or had happened), or existed, at some time before now (the applicable reference time).".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for past tense, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, which usually means its spelling is distinct enough that readers don't reach for a similar-looking word instead.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is past tense, spelled P-A-S-T- -T-E-N-S-E.
Definition
- 1A grammatical form (often a verb form) that refers to an event, transaction, occurrence, or object that happened (or had happened), or existed, at some time before now (the applicable reference time).
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how past tense appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
This is a report on a study of the use of the past tense forms in the 53 Japanese samples compiled for the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) project.
As you have studied Spanish, you have probably had the feeling that there are just too many past tenses.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.