Word.ws English Dictionary

tenses

/tɛnsɪz/

tenses is the plural of tense.

tenses is the third-person singular simple present indicative of tense.

Meaning of tense

Noun

tense (plural tenses)

  1. (uncountable) The property of indicating the point in time at which an action or state of being occurs or exists.
    • Dyirbal verbs are not inflected for tense.
  2. (countable) An inflected form of a verb that indicates tense.
    • English only has a past tense and a non-past tense; it has no future tense.
  3. (countable, proscribed) A grammatical aspect.
  4. (countable, proscribed) A verb form or construction indicating a combination of tense, aspect, and mood.
    • The "simple present" tense in English can have several meanings.

See all 11 meanings of tense

Phrases with tenses

8 more phrasesFewer phrases

Questions about tenses

What is tenses the plural of?
Tenses is the plural of tense.
How do you pronounce tenses?
Tenses is pronounced /tɛnsɪz/.

Words near tenses in the dictionary

  1. tenseness
  2. tensenesses
  3. tensening
  4. tensens
  5. tenser
  6. tenses
  7. tenses up
  8. tensest
  9. tensibility
  10. tensible
  11. tenside

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tenses (page history and authors); tense (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “tenses.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tenses. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.