How to use Past Perfect

Five Minute Guide to Past Perfect

Forming sentences with Past Perfect

• Past Perfect: had + past participle (verb 3)
• Past Perfect Continuous: had been + present participle (-ing form of verb)

Using Past Perfect

1. We use past perfect to talk about finished actions that happened before a certain time in the past.
   • I had finished lunch when they arrived.
   • You had left by the time they got here.
   • He didn’t want to come with us because he had already seen the film.
2. We use past perfect continuous to talk about longer actions or events that happened before or up to another action or event in the past.
   • He was tired because he had been playing football all day.
   • They ‘d been driving for three hours when the accident happened.
   • When I saw her I could see that she had been crying.
3. When the action or event is more temporary, we often use past perfect continuous. When it is more permanent, we often use past perfect.
   • We found the house where my grandparents had lived. (past perfect)
   • We found a house where another family had been living for a few months. (past perfect continuous)

Other rules and use of Past Perfect

1. Some verbs are not normally used with past perfect continuous because they are not action verbs, for example: believe, belong, depend, hate, know, like, love, mean, need, prefer, realise, suppose, want, understand.
   • I had known him for ten years when he got married – correct
   • I had been knowing him for ten years when he got married –incorrect
   • I had belonged to the tennis club for 25 years when I left – correct
   • I had been belonging to the tennis club for 25 years when I left –incorrect

Pronunciation

See the phonemic chart for IPA symbols used below.

1. If had is not completely contracted, it is usually reduced to its weak form in affirmative sentences and questions, sometimes with elision and intrusion.
   • We had already arrived:
     /wiː həd/ or /wiːjəd/ (the /h/ sound is elided and the /j/ sound intrudes)
   • You had tried many times:
     /juː həd/ or /uːwəd/ (the /h/ sound is elided and the /w/ sound intrudes)
   • Had they eaten? /həd/
2. Been is usually reduced to its weak form in past perfect continuous.
   • We’d been driving for a long time: /bɪn/

Past Perfect in detail

How do we form Past Perfect?

We form past perfect with the past tense form of the auxiliary verb “have” (had) and the past participle form of the main verb. We make the past participle of regular verbs in the same way that we make the past tense form, by adding “ed” to the base form (or just “d” if the verb ends in “e”):

• play – played
• laugh – laughed
• live – lived
• hope – hoped

Some verbs are irregular and so have irregular past participle forms, for example:

• catch – caught
• eat – eaten
• leave – left
• be – been

Here are some examples of past perfect statements with regular and irregular verbs.

• I had worked here for 5 years by the time you arrived.
• When it started to rain the workers had already picked all the fruit.
• The phone rang after she had eaten breakfast.
• He couldn’t talk to them because they had already left.
• She had been to New York many times.

Past perfect – Questions

With “yes/no” questions and object questions we have to invert the subject and the auxiliary verb. We already have an auxiliary verb (had) so we don’t need to add one. With subject questions the word order stays the same.

• Had they already left? (yes/no question)
• Why had they already left? (object question)
• Who had already left? (subject question)

Past perfect – Negatives

We make negative sentences with the auxiliary verb “had” and “not“.

• They had not left when I arrived.
• She had not been to New York.

We can contract these negatives in two ways:

• They hadn’t left when I arrived / They‘d not left when I arrived.

When do we use Past Perfect?

With present perfect we saw quite a number of different ways we could use it, all of which showed some kind of link between the present and the past. With the past perfect there is really one reason we use it. If we look closely at this meaning, we can again see some idea of a link between two times. Let’s see what that link is.

Past perfect – Completed actions before a certain time in the past

Have a look at this sentence:

• Goldilocks had left when the three bears arrived home.

As you can see, there are two actions going on in this sentence, each in its own clause. We have the action of “Goldilocks leaving” in one clause and the action of “the three bears arriving home” in the other.

Now, what can we say about when these actions happened? Well, the three bears arriving home is in the past simple, so we know that this is a completed action in the past. What about the action of Goldilocks leaving? Did that happen before the bears arrived home or after? Well, that’s where the past perfect comes in – the fact that this action is in past perfect tells us that it happened before the three bears arrived home.

Here’s another example:

• He was hungry because he hadn’t eaten breakfast.

In this example, we also have two events in the past. The past perfect tells us that “not eating breakfast” happened at some point before “being hungry”.

So, we use past perfect to show that something happened before a certain time in the past. And that’s where the link between two times comes in. You can imagine it as looking from one point in the past to a point further back in the past. So whereas with present perfect there was a link between present and past, with past perfect there is a link between the past and “further in the past”.

Now, this point in the past that we look back from could be another action, like in the examples above, or it could actually be a specific time, like in this example:

• By 2011 the USA had flown over 130 space shuttle missions.

Here, the point in the past that we’re looking back from is “2011”.

Optional past perfect

Sometimes the fact that one action happened before another is clear from the context. If this is the case then it’s not necessary to use past perfect. Have a look at this sentence:

• When I had got up I had a shower.

This sentence is okay, but we know that having a shower before you get up is not possible, so there is only one logical order of events in this case. As a result, we don’t need to use past perfect and so this sentence is also correct:

• When I got up I had a shower.

There is, in fact, another reason, apart from logic, why we don’t need to use past perfect in this example. When we use a clause starting with “when…” and both clauses are in past simple, the “when” clause always happens first.

Sometimes it’s other words in the sentence, rather than the context (or logic), that make the order of events clear, like “before”, “after” and “as soon as”:

• I took a shower before I had breakfast.

The word “before” tells us the order of events, so we don’t need to say “I had taken a shower”. But have a look at this sentence with “before”:

• She never saw a baseball match before she went to the USA.

This sounds a little strange. So what’s the difference between this sentence with “before” and the first one? Well, here we’re talking about a past experience – in this case, we have to use past perfect:

• She had never seen a baseball match before she went to the USA.

Past Perfect Continuous

Just as we could combine two forms of the present tense to make the present perfect continuous, so too can we combine two forms of the past tense to make the past perfect continuous. We already know how to form the past continuous and the past perfect. Forming the past perfect continuous is just a combination of the two.

We start with the past perfect of the verb “be”:

• had been

Next, we add the present participle form of the main verb:

• had been working

Just like with present perfect, we have two auxiliary verbs. Here are some examples:

• She had been working hard all day.
• They had been cooking dinner for 4 hours by the time I got there.

To make a “yes/no” or object question, we can only invert one of the auxiliary verbs with the subject. The second one stays where it is:

• Had she been working hard all day? (yes/no question)
• Why had she been working hard? (object question)
• Who had been working hard? (subject question)

So what about the meaning of the past perfect continuous? What are the similarities and differences with the past perfect? Well, there are two important differences. We’ll refer to past perfect as “past perfect simple” here, to contrast it with past perfect continuous.

Past Perfect Continuous – Longer actions continuing up to a certain time in the past

We saw that we use past perfect simple to talk about an action that happened before another action in the past. If that first action is a longer one which continued up to or just before the other action, we normally use past perfect continuous to emphasise this. Have a look at this example:

• When he walked into the room he could see that they had been playing Scrabble.

Using past perfect continuous here shows us that the action of playing Scrabble had been in progress for some time (maybe 2 minutes, maybe one hour) and continued up to the moment that, or perhaps just before, he entered the room. If we compare this to past perfect simple we can see the difference in meaning:

• When he walked into the room he could see that they had played Scrabble.

The action of playing Scrabble still happened before he entered the room, but this time there is a separation in time between the two events. We can imagine that he saw the Scrabble board but it had been tidied away – perhaps the game had finished half an hour earlier.

We can also get this idea of “duration up to a certain time in the past” with stative verbs. As we don’t normally use stative verbs with continuous forms of tenses, though, we can only use past perfect simple for this. Here are some examples:

• They had been in the car for 6 hours when they arrived at the hotel.
• He had loved her for ages by the time he asked her to marry him.

We have the idea that both these situations (“being in the car” and “loving her”) existed for some time up to the point when the second event happened (“arriving at the hotel” and “asking her to marry him”).

Past Perfect Continuous – Focus on the action

If you think back to when we looked at present perfect continuous, we saw that we often use it to focus on the action itself, and that we use present perfect simple to focus on the completion of the action and its result. The same is true of past perfect continuous. Here’s an example:

• I had worked hard on my presentation all afternoon and finally it was ready.
• I had been working hard on my presentation because I wanted to impress my boss.

In the first sentence, the emphasis is on the fact that the presentation is complete (and the result of this completion). In the second sentence, the speaker is focusing on the action of working itself – the presentation may or may not have been completed by the time of the second action.

Related grammar points

Past Simple
Tense and aspect