How many tenses are there in english

How many tenses are there in English? [closed]

This question does not appear to be about learning the English language within the scope defined in the help center.

I’ve been searching about this a bit.
Some say there are 12:

There are three main tenses: past, present, and future. In English, each of these tenses can take four main aspects: simple, perfect, continuous (also known as progressive), and perfect continuous. The perfect aspect is formed using the verb to have, while the continuous aspect is formed using the verb to be.

Some say there are 16:

Most mainstream grammar and course books will present you with the following list of verb tenses:

1- Present Simple (I study English every day.)

2- Present Continuous (I’m studying English at the moment.)

3- Present Perfect Simple (I’ve studied English for ages/since a very young age.)

4- Present Perfect Continuous (I’ve been studying a lot of English lately.)

5- Past Simple (I studied English last year.)

6- Past Continuous (I was studying English when you called me.)

7- Past Perfect Simple (I had already studied English before I moved to Canada.)

8- Past Perfect Continuous (I had been studying English for many years when I decided to become an English teacher.)

9- Future Simple (I will probably study English at a higher level in the future.)

10- Future Continuous (I’ll be studying English at that time tomorrow.)

11- Future Perfect Simple (At that time next week, I will have studied English for at least 10 hours.)

12- Future Perfect Continuous (By the time I move to Canada, I’ll have been studying English for many years.)

13- “Futurity” (“going to” future for intentions) (I’m going to study English this afternoon.)

14- “Futurity in the past” (I was going to study English today, but I had unexpected visitors.)

Some grammar books will also include the so called “Conditional tenses” (or Future Past tenses):

15- Simple conditional (I would study English.)

16- Continuous conditional (I would be studying English.)

17- Perfect conditional (I would have studied English.)

18- Perfect Continuous conditional (I would have been studying English.)

As you can see, there are 12 main “tenses”, plus other 2 ways of expressing future intentions, plus other 4 conditional/future-past “tenses”.

And some even say there are 24 or 26. It is a little complicated and most grammar books like the ones that I have, Grammar in Use and Grammar for IELTS do not teach the tenses integrated in one place instead they do teach the tenses based on their application.
So here I want a comprehensive post which can be cited later about tenses in English and time expressions for each as it is learned by a native speaker at school.

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While the categories of tense and aspect are commonly thought of as verb properties, there are examples of nominal (meaning noun) tenses. In languages like Guarani, widely spoken in South Africa, or Tundra Nenets, used in Siberia, Russia, nouns have suffixes that give them past or future meaning. For example, ‘a broken vase’ is vase + past tense modifier, literally “what used to be a vase”, a ‘law student’ is lawyer + future tense suffix, and tea is nothing more than past tense leaves.

Another wonderful verbal category closely related to tense is evidentiality, or indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement. In English we usually specify the source of information using special words («reportedly») or phrases («from what he told me»). However, other languages have whole systems of adverbial suffixes meant to show where the knowledge came from. For example, the Bulgarian language has a four-term system of evidentials: witness («I know because I saw it»), inferential («I assume so because there is evidence»), renarrative («I know because I’ve been told») and dubitative («I have heard about it, but I doubt it»). That means you can say ‘The cat ate the fish’ and by adding a couple of letters to the word ‘ate’ you will show how you got this information. To learn more about how languages across the world are similar and how they are different you can browse the World Atlas of Language Structures.

The idea that the language you speak determines the way you think is known as linguistic determinism, or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. You might recognize it from the recent Hollywood film “Arrival” where by learning the alien language in which the concept of time doesn’t exist at all the heroine was able to recall her own future. This hypothesis is not supported by most linguists and it is widely accepted that thought is not the same as language, all of which is brilliantly explained in a popular lecture by one of the world’s most influential linguists Steven Pinker. However, it stands to reason that language does affect the way our cognitive abilities develop – learn more about it by watching a talk at UC San Diego. To dig a bit deeper into how language is acquired in watch at this TED talk about the linguistic genius of babies

If you are a student of English and would like to see more English grammar explained through sketches, you can watch videos by this author here.

How Many Tenses in English?

A reader questions the veracity of my saying that English has three main tenses:

Most modern grammar writers argue that there are only two tenses in English, past and present. We talk about the future using various modal verbs, including WILL, because we are usually talking about our perception of the future. The example you give…seems pretty nonsensical to me.

In the terminology of linguistics, English is a language with only two tenses: past and present.

Linguistics is a useful science. Because it is a science, it needs numerous precise terms that enable its students to make fine distinctions about the function of words in different languages.

The focus of linguistics is not English, but all the languages of the world. Students of this demanding science need to distinguish between tense and aspect; between adjectives that describe people and adjectives that describe inanimate objects.

Words like determiner, intensifier, modal, and word class are suited to making finer distinctions than adjective, adverb, helping verb, and part of speech. But I find that the older terms serve me adequately in explaining basic usage to students for whom a little grammar goes a long way.

How many tenses in English? The answer all depends upon whom you ask and what meaning you attach to the grammatical term tense.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines grammatical tense as “any one of the different forms or modifications (or word groups) in the conjugation of a verb which indicate the different times (past, present, or future) at which the action or state denoted by it is viewed as happening or existing.”

Most ESL sites set the number of English tenses at twelve. One site I found adds a thirteenth tense to accommodate the way we express the future with going and an infinitive: I’m going to paint the garage in the morning.

In the realm of linguistics, English has only two tenses: present and past because according to linguistics terminology, a tense is indicated by a distinctive verb form. “I sing” is in the present tense because the idea of present time is expressed in the single form sing.

“I sang” is past tense because the idea of past time is expressed in the single form sang.

What I and a great many other English teachers still call “future tense” is not a tense according to linguistics terminology because it requires a helping verb (modal). “I will sing” is not a separate tense, but an aspect of the present tense.

For what I do, such distinctions seem unnecessarily confusing. I do not write for grammarians or students of linguistics; I don’t have the training or knowledge to do so. My focus is basic English usage. From my point of view, English has three main tenses: present, past, and future. Each of these main tenses has sub-tenses. Here are the twelve English tenses as conventionally taught:

Simple Present: He sings.
Present Perfect: He has sung.
Present Continuous: He is singing.
Present Perfect Continuous: He has been singing.

Simple Past: He sang.
Past Perfect: He had sung.
Past Continuous: He was singing.
Past Perfect Continuous: He had been singing.

Simple Future: He will sing.
Future Continuous: He will be singing.
Future Perfect: He will have sung.
Future Perfect Continuous: He will have been singing.

Note: The continuous tenses are also known as progressive tenses.

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13 Responses to “How Many Tenses in English?”

Very informative Maeve.

I wonder, do you (or any of your readers) know whether there are any languages that do have a genuine future tense (in the strict linguistic terms you describe)?

Thank you for this article, I think. It starts to elaborate upon a topic I’ve been curious about for some time. The hesitation is because, as oftentimes happens when delving into a topic, the first explanation creates even more questions.

Since a tense is defined as a “distinct verb form,” why aren’t there five tenses in English? From the examples given, we find:
sang
sing
singing
sings
sung

One could argue that three of those have the same root, therefore the other forms of sing are just conjugations. Doing so still gives us three tenses, & poses yet another question of where does the word “conjugation” fit with tense, modal, & aspect?

Further, especially from a pictorial point of view, the other two forms of sing are clearly different. From a programmers point of view in English, let alone if we examine graphical languages such as Chinese, we get into inconsistent, more than just irregular, changes as well.

I can’t help noticing that, in your examples, present perfect and past perfect could very easily be confused.

Aside from that, the term ‘perfect’ itself confuses me, and likely quite a few other people. Is there some sort of easy way for us to get a handle on its grammatical sense? A mnemonic, perhaps?

Thank you for making more sense of what already seemed pretty sensible. Moreover, thank you for opening up a tea-can of wrist slapping for the questioner in your clear exposition of the principles at work.

One could argue that English has additional verb tenses (double the number?) if one includes the passive tenses, e.g.:

Active Verb Tense
The instructor teaches verb tenses to the students.

Passive Verb Tense — The students are taught verb tenses by the instructor.

Great article! You summarized everything very well. I don’t understand why so many people have trouble understanding your points.

With that said, I never tell my ESL students that English has only two, or three, verb tenses. They seem very comfortable with the twelve tense concept.

In class I make infrequent reference to the term progressive tense. Using continuous tense makes more sense to my students. He/she is doing it right now (continuous), as in ‘Present Continuous: He is singing.’

Thanks for all of your wonderful contributions!

“I wonder, do you (or any of your readers) know whether there are any languages that do have a genuine future tense (in the strict linguistic terms you describe)?”

None of the Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Swedish etc.) have a true future tense.

The Romance languages do though. In French (for example), the future tense of “je suis” (I am) is “je serai” (I will be). The future tense of Italian “essi parlano” (they speak) is “essi parleranno” (they will speak).

Curtis,
As relates to grammar, the term “perfect” is synonymous with “completed”:
The OED definition for “perfect” in this sense:

“Designating or relating to a verbal tense which denotes a completed action.”

Richard and JJM,

most Slavic languages have a true future tense, usually in the perfective aspect.
Turkish has it, so I guess other Turkic languages have it too.

“Since a tense is defined as a ‘distinct verb form,’ why aren’t there five tenses in English? From the examples given, we find:
sang
sing
singing
sings
sung

One could argue that three of those have the same root, therefore the other forms of sing are just conjugations. Doing so still gives us three tenses, & poses yet another question of where does the word “conjugation” fit with tense, modal, & aspect?”

You’ve missed another factor of “tense” here: it’s a distinct verb form that indicates either past, present or future time. English verbs only have distinct forms for the past and present. Of your five forms above, two are present tense (sing,* sings) and two are past tense (sang, sung). Although we call it a “present participle”, “singing” is without tense at all; it merely conveys the idea on an ongoing action whether in the past, present or future.

Lastly, it’s worth remembering that our system of grammatical tense was designed for Latin originally, not English. Latin has a distinct set of verb forms to handle not only tense but also aspect, voice and mood. Latin has a true future tense and no modal verbs at all.

Not surprising then that superimposing grammatical principles designed to describe Latin verbs on English ones is going to create some ambiguity.

* Though it’s even debatable whether “sing” indicates present tense. It is also the infinitive/base form of the verb.

JJM and Pablo, thank you.

I teach English and I am a linguist, so I keep switching between the two perspectives as needed. There is a fundamental error in the article and the question. When linguists talk about two tenses in English, they distinguish between past and non-past, not past and present. The line is drawn where present begins. This distinction comes in handy when you have to explain the difference between say: “I completed the work before they arrived” vs. “I will complete the work before they arrive.” Why can’t we say: I will complete the work before they will arrive?” Why is arrive in the “present” even though it is understood to happen in the future? The use of ‘will’ to indicate future time may lie in its origins.

Interesting article, Maeve.

I personally take the view that English has only two tenses, based on the existence of specific verb forms proper to those tenses. Putting on my ESL teaching hat however, and so as not to create undue confusion, I stick with the three-tense model.

Richard White asks whether there are any languages that do have a genuine future tense. Latin was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and as an example, French has such a “true” future tense (the “futur simple”), with distinct verb forms:

I go:
Present Simple: je vais
Past Simple: j’allais or j’allai (imparfait vs. passé simple)
Future Simple: j’irai

How many tenses does English have and which should I learn?

Updated July 5, 2022

Studying English and wondering if you really need to learn all of those tenses? How many tenses are there in English even? You’re not the only one. There’s no denying that English has a lot of grammar to learn. There are arguments about how many tenses there really are, but it certainly feels like learning them is an endless process for English learners.

Ready to start learning with Lingoda?

How many verb tenses does English have?

Two, actually. Past and present.

The rest of what you think of as tenses are actually aspects of a tense; the past perfect is an aspect of the past tense. And we talk about the future using different modal verbs, like will.

So do English speakers use all of the tenses in English? Yes, of course, if you’re convinced there are only two. However, most summaries of English tenses show that there are 12 tenses, and learners are instructed to study and use them all.

Table of the English tenses

Which tenses do native English speakers use most often?

Present simple

The most common tense used by native speakers is the present simple. You’re probably thinking: Hallelujah!

This is the first tense that learners are taught with phrases such as “My name is Tom and I am 7 years old.” And it is by far the most useful tense: in spoken language, over 50% of interactions are done in the present simple.

Things like arguing: “You always leave your dirty undies on the bathroom floor!” or complaining: “This blender doesn’t work.”

Past simple

The next most common tense used in spoken English is the past simple. Good news again! We use the past simple to tell stories about our past experiences. We talk about our holidays and our work, we gossip and we tell people the news. “I went to Crete in July,” or “I heard Jean got a boob job!”.

Next comes the future simple. Yes! Another easy tense, this is the future with will. Native speakers use this tense all the time: “I think I’ll have another cup of tea.” “Don’t worry Pat, I’ll pick you up on Friday.” This tense is often used for the spontaneous, unplanned future, which apparently we native speakers like a lot.

If only I could stop writing there, you’d be a happy English learner right?

Unfortunately, there is one more tense which comes up a lot in spoken English. And it’s the present perfect. Noooooo! Most learners have real trouble mastering this tense. But native speakers? We love it.

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Present perfect

We use it to talk about things that have just happened: “I have just seen your husband kissing another woman!”. Things which started in the past and continue to the present: “I have lived in the UK all my life.” Things that have a bearing on the present: “I’ve lost my keys so I can’t get in the house.” This happens more often than most of us want to admit. And experiences without being too specific: “I have read three Jane Austen books.” This last one might sound a bit like bragging, but let’s be honest, we all do it.

Which tenses do native speakers not use?

Native speakers rarely use the future perfect, the future continuous or the future perfect continuous. This goes for both spoken and written English.

If you think about it, it’s rare in normal conversation to have to say: “By this time next week, I will have lived in Australia for 10 years.” You do need the future perfect to say this sentence correctly, but it’s a once in a blue moon statement. Similarly, “This time next month, I’ll be sitting on the beach in Italy,” is, sadly, a once a year statement for most of us.

We also rarely use the past perfect continuous. It’s not often in normal life that we say, “I had been waiting 10 minutes before you showed up.” Native speakers are more likely to say, “I was waiting for 10 minutes…” or even, “I waited 10 minutes…”.

Which English tenses should I learn?

Well, all of them. Because when you need the future perfect, you need it.

However, knowing which tenses native speakers use most often can help you decide how much time to devote to learning each tense. In classes, teachers often focus attention on the rarer, seemingly more difficult tenses.

You should focus on studying the simple tenses and the present perfect, as over 95% of your interactions will be in these tenses.

So, how many tenses do English speakers actually use?

12. How many do we use frequently? 4. Good news!

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Laura is a freelance writer and was an ESL teacher for eight years. She was born in the UK and has lived in Australia and Poland, where she writes blogs for Lingoda about everything from grammar to dating English speakers. She’s definitely better at the first one. She loves travelling and that’s the other major topic that she writes on. Laura likes pilates and cycling, but when she’s feeling lazy she can be found curled up watching Netflix. She’s currently learning Polish, and her battle with that mystifying language has given her huge empathy for anyone struggling to learn English. Find out more about her work in her portfolio.

How many tenses are there in English?

Do we have 16 tenses in English?

Can we manipulate these together to create English tenses? For example, «present perfect» or «future perfect continuous«?

11 Answers 11

What is a tense?

In linguistic terminology, «tense» is a part of verbal paradigm that refers specifically to the time of an utterance. It is impossible for any language to have more than three tenses in this sense, since any action is either past, present, or future.

In English, we do the basic tenses this way:

But what is that with the word will there in the future tense example? It turns out that while English can refer to present and past time using inflections on the verb itself, the future tense always requires another word. Furthermore, there are multiple ways of doing this:

So while English has plenty of ways to refer to future actions, in terms of base verbal morphology there are only two tenses in English: present and past.

So what about perfect, progressive, and the rest of that stuff?

Linguists refer to these as aspect. A verb’s aspect refers to its duration, frequency, or completeness. English has three core aspects:

Plus, we can combine progressive and perfect together as follows:

Unfortunately, the way that these forms interact with meaning is very complex. In particular, we often use the simple present («I walk to the store») to refer to habitual actions, and the simple progressive («I am walking to the store») to refer to currently ongoing actions.

Now you’ve made me upset

That’s because of mood, the other major component of the English verbal complex. Mood refers to the speaker’s attitude towards the action, whether the speaker thinks the action is necessary, obligatory, inevitable, hypothetical, etc. We have a lot of moods in English, indicated by our modal verbs:

Here, again, the form interacts with the meaning in a complicated way. The modal verbs will and shall tend to indicate future time more than anything really «moody», and there are constraints on which moods can be used in which tenses. Just to keep you on your toes.

Really we have 4 modal verbs which occur in present/past tense pairs: will/would, shall/should, can/could, may/might, and then must which can only be present-tense.

And don’t forget about voice

Because we also have active voice and passive voice in English, which refer to the subject and the object are assigned to the verb.

These have nothing to do with tense, but they are still part of the verbal paradigm.

Putting it all together

If you multiply all of those together you get eighty-eight possible combinations.

Don’t try to memorize them all. Just try to remember the way the pieces interact, and you should be able to construct and interpret any combination that you come across. And remember that many verbs, like the past debitive perfect passive about to appear in this sentence, should rarely have ever been used by anyone.

But it’s not that simple

It never is. The preceding elements are the core verbal paradigm, but there are a lot of other things that English does with its verbs to indicate elements of mood, aspect, or tense. Just to name two, we have:

There are lots of other combinations of helping verbs, adverbs, and prepositions which are sometimes used to express tense-like or aspect-like things in English. Merely knowing how the core verbal paradigm fits together doesn’t necessarily help you interpret these kinds of utterances. Rather, these idiomatic verbal constructions have to be learned one at a time.

Also, please do read the comments on this answer, as the commenters have brought up numerous other subtleties and distinctions which I didn’t get into the main post. The final takeaway of all this discussion is that English verbs are complex and you probably can’t count how many forms they have.

Almost all grammarians recognize only two tenses in English, present and past. That is because only they require a change in the finite form of the verb. Constructions such as the present progressive or past perfect are analysed in terms of aspect, although the present and past tenses express aspect too.

For example, regular verbs have four forms. In the case of walk they are walk, walks, walking, walked. In the third person singular, the present tense is walks and the past tense is walked. A clause such as he is walking is made up of the present tense of be and the present participle of walk and expresses progressive aspect.

EDIT:

This is a view held by at least three reputable professional linguists. R L Trask, formerly Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex) in ‘Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts’:

David Crystal in ‘The Cambridge Encylopedia of the English Language’:

Bas Aarts, Professor of English Linguistics at University College London in ‘Oxford Modern English Grammar’:

English has only two grammatically encoded tenses, the present tense and the past tense.

Whoever downvoted my answer is downvoting these three as well.

Functional grammar gets round these difficulties to some extent with its concepts of Finite and Predicator. In a clause such as:

the Finite is was and the Predicator lying. In a clause such as:

the Finite is [past] and the Predicator occurred.

But these are deep waters.

Once upon a time I found a nice map of English tenses.

The appropriate answer to this question depends a little on your purpose, and in any case there’s no single, consensually agreed upon answer.

That said, and perhaps most interestingly, not all speakers appear to allow exactly the same set of combinations. So for example, some, but not all speakers, appear to allow sentences such as:

The road has not been being built for several days.

Therefore, I wouldn’t get too bogged down in trying to memorise a «definitive list»— there’s not really such a thing.

From a more theoretical perspective, it’s common to take the view that English has only two tenses: present and past. Other periphrastic constructions that are loosely «time-related» would be analysed as containing markers of other phenomena such as aspect or modality. However, there isn’t a consensus on this analysis.

As you might expect, the answer to this question really depends on your definition of «tense».

If you take a very strict definition of tense as being something like the «grammaticalisation of location in time», then you generally end up concluding that English has two tenses, which you might call «past» vs «non-past» (or «past» vs «present» or. well, it doesn’t particularly matter, they’re just labels: the point is there’s two of them). Other components of verbal constructions are then grammaticalisations of other phenomena: aspect, voice, phase, mood etc, which themselves may even get broken down into further categories. This view has the advantage that you’re «calling a spade a spade»: you have a fairly clear phenomenon that you’re attaching fairly consistent label to. You have a «1:1 match» between label and phenomenon, if you like.

Another, more informal, view is to consider «tenses» as being the full range of structures, affixes etc that you can «build around» a verb without altering the range of possible subjects, objects etc that can be associated with the verb (i.e. items that don’t have their own argument structure, to use the technical term).

Informally, especially in informal foreign language classes, it’s common to use the latter definition. That then leaves two problems:

In the first case, you might say that «will» marks «future tense». But on the other hand, when you actually look at how «will» is used, it isn’t really encoding just «futureness» but a hots of other things. And other modals like «should», «would», «could», «must» etc also encode a host of things— in other words, there’s not necessarily anything particularly special or «uniquely tense-related» about «will» compared to other modal verbs. (This does arguably happen with «past tense» too, incidentally: at the end of a game show when the host says «Let’s look at what was behind the curtain», the car/toaster in question is actually still there— the «past» tense is encoding something other than simple «pastness» here.)

Then there is the problem that in English unlike, say, French, the range of possibilities of ‘syntactic real estate’ that you can put around the verb without changing its argument structure is quite large and not precisely delimited. (It’s actually not 100% delimited even in French, but close enough for practical purposes.) Speakers will probably agree that «was built» and «was building» are fine. But, for example, if you ask a number of speakers whether in the ‘range of possibilities’ they would include cases such as «was been being built», you will get different answers. So it isn’t really possible to give a precise number. (It’s also not really clear why a precise number matters 🙂

English has present and past tense.

Forms of the verb be, in either tense, can be used with an -ing verb. This is the progressive aspect.

I [see / saw / am seeing / was seeing] that.

The verb have can be combined with any of those. This is the perfect.

I [have seen / had seen / have been seeing / had been seeing] that.

And any of those eight combinations can be combined with a modal verb: may/might, can/could, shall/should, will/would, and must. (The past tense of must is must.)

I [may see / might see / may be seeing / might be seeing / may have seen / might have seen / may have been seeing / might have been seeing] that.

This gives sixteen combinations in all.

Conditionals complicate the choice of which combination to use, but they don’t add new combinations.

In case it is not clear: only the first verb in the chain is ever marked for past tense. The verb immediately after the perfect have is always the past participle. The verb immediately after the progressive be is marked with -ing.

These cover the ways verbs are most often used in main clauses. From here it gets more complicated, because there are also many other things to know about how verbs are used—the imperative, subjunctive, infinitive, gerund, passive, and so on.

There are only two tenses in English, past and present.

The «number of grammatical tenses» you refer to are compound-tenses and modals, not tenses in their own right.

There are 16, I believe: Past, Present, Future, and Future-in-the-Past, and each of those can be Indefinite (called Simple now), Continuous, Perfect and Perfect Continuous.

4×4 = 16 different combinations.

You can find a list of tenses at http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/tenses. This page seems to cover everything except the imperative mood. If you need practice in actual tense use, try http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/tenses.

There is a difference between tense in the loose sense it is used by language teachers, and the strict definition relating to time alone that is agreed in linguistics. Teachers will typically give a list of around 16 as suggested in the question and some of the answers.

These differences are a bit arbitrary, and there are additional dimensions as discussed in great detail (but still incompletely) by JSB and others: aspect, voice and mood/mode. What has been neglected in particular is the indicative, imperative and interrogative moods.

It is a bit arbitrary to say that some verbs are auxiliary verbs and some are modal verbs and there are many other constructions other than those traditional auxiliaries and modals. The use of «be/is/are» and «have/has» as auxiliaries with participles is really/originally just the standard predicative construction (it is finishing/finished/finite) and the standard possessive construction (it has finished; it has a nice finish/style; it has style).

The modal constructions listed by JSB have the distinctive property that their roots don’t act as infinitives (although future marker «will» does in its primary sense relating to acts of the will), and the main verb that follows is bare (without «to»). But there are many other constructions that affect mood/intention/likelihood/definiteness:

naked infinitive with implicit/explicit +that+: insisted, suggested, mandated, ordered.