English Tenses at a Glance – Names and Construction

Today I’d like to show you how you can easily memorize all English tenses. Well, I mean their names and how they are built. I’m not going to talk about when each of the tenses should be used, though, because this would make this article way too long. And besides, each of the tenses deserves an article of its own. So, let me leave the detailed discussion of each of the tenses for the future and now let’s just focus on how the tenses are constructed.

One more remark. In this article I’m only going to discuss active voice forms. Again, passive forms would make this article too cluttered.

Classification of English Tenses

I know many learners of English have problems memorizing the names of the tenses, let alone constructing and using them correctly. Let’s start with the names of the tenses.

There are two ways English tenses may be categorized. If you consider the time the tenses refer to, there are three possibilities: They may refer to the present, to the past or to the future. This gives us three groups of tenses: present tenses, past tenses and future tenses.

You can also classify English tenses according to their aspect. Here we have four groups: simple tenses, continuous tenses, perfect tenses and perfect continuous tenses. Sometimes you can see the term progressive instead of continuous. They are synonymous in this context.

Names of English Tenses

These two classifications overlap and this means each tense may be classified in one of the groups in either classification. So, we have three groups based on time (present, past, future) and four groups based on aspect (simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous), which, altogether, gives us 12 combinations. These 12 combinations are the twelve English tenses. The following table illustrates it:

As you can see the names of the tenses consist of two parts, here marked by different colors. The first part (in red) derives from the time-based classification, the other part (in blue) derives from the aspect-based one.

Construction of English Tenses

Now that you know how the names of the tenses are created, let’s have a look at how the verb forms are created. Again, in either classification there are some characteristic features which all tenses in a group share.

So, all present tense forms contain a base verb form, be it a full verb or an auxiliary verb. All past tense forms contain a past verb form. Finally, all future tense forms contain the verb will followed by a base verb form.

As far as aspect is concerned, all simple tenses in affirmative sentences contain just a simple verb form, without any auxiliary verbs, except for Future Simple where we have will + a simple verb form. All continuous tenses contain a form of the auxiliary verb be and a verb with the –ing ending, which is also known as the present participle. All perfect tenses contain a form of the auxiliary verb have. Perfect Continuous, which is both a perfect tense and a continuous one, combines the features of both.

Example

Let me demonstrate all these features in a table again. Here we can see the verb to go in all the tenses. The base verb form is go. I’m using the first person singular forms only for brevity, but with the other persons it works just the same:

All English Tenses One by One

And now let’s have a look at all the tenses one by one. For the sake of completeness, I’ll add an interrogative and a negative example as well. Also, I’ll highlight the features characteristic of each tense.  

English Tenses Clarified – Present Tenses

First the present tenses: Present Simple, Present Continuous, Present Perfect and Present Perfect Continuous.

Present Simple

Present Continuous

Present Perfect

Present Perfect Continuous

English Tenses Clarified – Past Tenses

Now the past tenses: Past Simple, Past Continuous, Past Perfect and Past Perfect Continuous.

Past Simple

Past Continuous

Past Perfect

Past Perfect Continuous

English Tenses Clarified – Future Tenses

Finally the future tenses: Future Simple, Future Continuous, Future Perfect and Future Perfect Continuous.

Future Simple

Future Continuous

Future Perfect

Future Perfect Continuous

And that’s it for the time being. I hope you enjoyed your journey across English tenses.