preterite
Britishnoun
-
a tense of verbs used to relate past action, formed in English by inflection of the verb, as jumped, swam
-
a verb in this tense
adjective
Etymology
Origin of preterite
C14: from Late Latin praeteritum ( tempus ) past (time, tense), from Latin praeterīre to go by, from preter- + īre to go
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But if he says, “I shooted you,” you're only doing him a favor by improving his form: “The correct preterite is ‘shot’.”
From Slate ● Aug. 20, 2014
And what are we preterite souls left to do but open our browsers each morning with that sickly tinge of disaster anticipation we've become habituated to since Sept.
From Salon ● Aug. 10, 2011
What does a writer do when he has already won the Man Booker Prize and can make copacetic use of words like preterite, spalpeen, goitrous and phthistic?
From New York Times ● Apr. 4, 2010
The grammatical changes were few, and, except for a diminishing use of pronominal suffixes, those, like the new preterite of gwîl, to do, were chiefly false analogies, or else imitations of English.
From A Handbook of the Cornish Language chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature by Henry Jenner
The weak verbs form their preterite by the addition of the syllable -te, and their past participle by means of a t-suffix.
From A Middle High German Primer Third Edition by Joseph Wright
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
