simple past meaning
ENWSimple past
- The simple past or past simple, sometimes called the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses.
- The term "simple" is used to distinguish the syntactical construction whose basic form uses the plain past tense alone, from other past tense constructions which use auxiliaries in combination with participles,
- NounPLsimple pasts
- (grammar) A tense used to describe something that happened in the past, formed by inflection of a single word (i.e., without any auxiliary verb such as be or have).
- (grammar) A tense used to describe something that happened in the past, formed by inflection of a single word (i.e., without any auxiliary verb such as be or have).
Definition of simple past in English Dictionary
- Part-of-Speech Hierarchy
- Nouns
- Countable nouns
- Countable nouns
- Nouns
- en simple pasts
Source: Wiktionary
Grammatically, this idiom "simple past" is a noun, more specifically, a countable noun.