Get to know Past better with 10+ real example sentences, the meaning and synonyms like former or tense.
Past in a sentence
Related words
Past meaning
- The period of time that has already happened, in contrast to the present and the future.
- The past tense.
Synonyms of Past
Using Past
- The main meaning on this page is: The period of time that has already happened, in contrast to the present and the future. | The past tense.
- Useful related words include: former, tense, future, outgoing.
- In the example corpus, past often appears in combinations such as: the past, past the, past year.
Context around Past
- Average sentence length in these examples: 28.1 words
- Position in the sentence: 7 start, 12 middle, 1 end
- Sentence types: 20 statements, 0 questions, 0 exclamations
Corpus analysis for Past
- In this selection, "past" usually appears in the middle of the sentence. The average example has 28.1 words, and this corpus slice is mostly made up of statements.
- Around the word, simple, pluperfect, preterite, relative, participles and six stand out and add context to how "past" is used.
- Recognizable usage signals include in the past, for the past relative to, past year, past two and past week. That gives this page its own corpus information beyond isolated example sentences.
- By corpus frequency, "past" sits close to words such as making, does and night, which helps place it inside the broader word index.
Example types with past
The same corpus examples are grouped by length and sentence type, making it easier to see the contexts in which the word appears:
And if you don’t learn from the past you may repeat the mistakes of the past. (17 words)
He has been thinking a lot and is ready to let the past be in the past. (17 words)
At 34 the midfielder is past being a 46-game-a-season man but far from past being a footballer. (20 words)
But it wasn't until many years later that I was kind of going through my own mental health struggles — figuring out how to resolve things that had happened in the past, or feeling like I was always living with one foot in the past. (45 words)
Tenses that refer to the past relative to the time under consideration are called anterior; these include the pluperfect (for the past relative to a past time) and the future perfect (for the past relative to a future time). (39 words)
Backstage: The roving cameraman quizzed Bobby Roode about past problems at Destination X. Roode said the past is the past and the future is now because he needs points in the BFG Series to become TNA Champion again. (38 words)
Example sentences (20)
Tenses that refer to the past relative to the time under consideration are called anterior; these include the pluperfect (for the past relative to a past time) and the future perfect (for the past relative to a future time).
As you can see in the table above, I also looked at data for the past three months, the past six months, and the past year.
Backstage: The roving cameraman quizzed Bobby Roode about past problems at Destination X. Roode said the past is the past and the future is now because he needs points in the BFG Series to become TNA Champion again.
She travels to the past and attempts to hand the past Voyager over to the Vidiians while she takes her past self home, but this attempt is thwarted.
Some languages have different verb forms or constructions which manifest relative tense, such as pluperfect ("past-in-the-past") and " future-in-the-past ".
The aorist was the "simple past", while the imperfective denoted uncompleted action in the past, and the perfect was used for past events having relevance to the present.
The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also serve as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i-, y- and sometimes bi-.
The "Past Verb" (فعل ماضي, fi'l maadiy) denotes an event (حدث, hadath) completed in the past, but it says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status.
The simple (one-word) forms are commonly referred to as the present, the simple past or preterite The preterite and imperfect are sometimes called, somewhat redundantly, the preterite past and imperfect past.
The six-tense language Kalaw Lagaw Ya of Australia has the remote past, the recent past, the today past, the present, the today/near future and the remote future.
Two of them are simple – past aorist inferential and past imperfect inferential – and are formed by the past participles of perfective and imperfective verbs, respectively.
And if you don’t learn from the past you may repeat the mistakes of the past.
And I think this movie does a really amazing job of kind of reflecting on those past lives, those past memories of who we were, and mourning those people.
At 34 the midfielder is past being a 46-game-a-season man but far from past being a footballer.
Bitcoin has kicked off 2023 with modest gains—but has barely budged in the past week and is up over the past day by just 1%.
But it wasn't until many years later that I was kind of going through my own mental health struggles — figuring out how to resolve things that had happened in the past, or feeling like I was always living with one foot in the past.
Chris continued: "One of the smuggest things I feel is going past a long line of cars in a traffic jam, smoothly, serenely sliding past on my bike.
Faith Giesbrecht has owned a business in the area for the past 32 years, saying that over the past few years, the vulnerable population has grown.
He has been thinking a lot and is ready to let the past be in the past.
He has taken one point from his past eight Premier League games as a manager and has lost six of his past nine league matches at Chelsea.
Phrases with past
These phrases have their own page with example sentences containing the full combination:
Common combinations with past
These word pairs occur most frequently in English texts: