Preterite

The preterite (abbreviated PRET or PRT, in American English also preterit; aorist, simple past, past indicative, or past historic) is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place or were completed in the past. In general, it is the perfective aspect of the past tense (not to be confused with the similarly named perfect) and may thus be more precisely called the perfective past. But, in English, which does not have an inflection for perfective aspect, the term is used for the simple-past tense.