Here are four verbs with tricky past tenses. Bear. When your verb has homonyms, its dictionary entry can feel like a maze. When you look up “bear,” for example, you have to skim past all the ...

If you've ever felt that English could use a couple more tenses to truly capture the nuances of the past, present, and future, this exploration of languages that have taken verb tenses to ...

Past perfect: I had written the letter before she advised me against doing so. (Two actions: writing and advising.) The examples show that some people confuse has/have with had because they fail ...

The past tense of “lie” is downright cruel: It’s “lay.” The past participle is “lain.” Today I lie down. Yesterday I lay down. In the past I have lain down.