Imperfect
The
imperfect is a verb form, found in various languages, which combines past tense and imperfective aspect. It can therefore have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to walk." It contrasts with preterite forms, which refer to a single completed event in the past. Traditionally, the imperfect of languages such as Latin and French is referred to as one of the tenses, although in fact it encodes aspectual information in addition to tense. It may be more precisely called
past imperfective. When used in relation to English, "imperfect" refers to forms much more commonly called
past progressive or
past continuous These are combinations of past tense with specifically continuous or progressive aspect. The term can take on specific conventional meanings in the grammars of particular languages. In German,
Imperfekt was used to refer to the simply conjugated past tense, but the term
Präteritum is now preferred, since the form does not carry any implication of imperfective aspect. "Imperfect" comes from the Latin
imperfectus "unfinished", because the imperfect expresses an ongoing, uncompleted action.