Definition:
An aspect of the verb that designates an action which has been completed before another past action. Formed with the past participle of a verb and the auxiliary had, the past perfect indicates a time further back in the past than the present perfect or the simple past tense.
Examples and Observations:
- "With his new, heightened feelings, he was overwhelmed by sadness at the way the others had laughed and shouted, playing at war."
(Lois Lowry, The Giver) - "My wife was delighted with the home I had given her amid the prairies of the far west."
(William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody) - "Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary's eyes, and Mary was blind."
(Laura I. Wilder) - "At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice."
(Maya Angelou) - "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
(Albert Camus) - "Only in grammar can you be more than perfect. . . . The Latin plus quam per fectum means "more than perfect," and the French pronunciation of plus is close to "ploo"; that gave us pluperfect--not merely completed at some vague time in the past, maybe just now, but completed at or before a certain time. For another biblical example, Luke writes of the prodigal son: 'And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine.' The little auxiliary word had does the perfecting trick, locating the action just after the spending of all.
"Perfect refines the past tense, which is why some grammarians like to call the pluperfect the past perfect."
(William Safire, "Tense Encounter," The New York Times, January 19, 1992)
Also Known As: pluperfect
