12 Major English Tenses [with Examples, Schemes & Building Formulas]

Grammar is the cornerstone of English knowledge. Without a proper understanding of grammar, it’s difficult to express your thoughts and ideas or to get your message across in general. Grammar helps transfer meaning through word structures, phrases, clauses, sentences, or even complete structured texts.

Of course, when talking about grammar, tenses are pretty much impossible to ignore. They are responsible for expressing time in relation to the current conversation. A great way to see all the variety of tenses and their use would be by checking out some works in our collection of free essays.

There are three major groups of tenses in the English language: present, past, and future. There’s also a “future-in-the-past” group that’s closely related to the conditional verb form. It references a time in the future in relation to past time.

But let’s not make things overly complicated from the very beginning.

To make it easier to understand the essential peculiarities of English tenses, we’ve put together the infographic you can see below. It uncovers the three major groups of tenses along with their respective aspects.

For clearer understanding, we’ve also provided formulas to build a particular tense and examples of sentences for each of the tenses.