Past Perfect

The past perfect, also called the pluperfect, is a tense that’s used to describe an action or event that occurred before the past moment being referenced.

In English, the past perfect is formed using a combination of two words: an auxiliary verb which is always the simple past of the verb to have (i.e. had), and a main verb in past participle form:

They had written.

It had exploded.

Similar to other past tense forms, the past perfect can also be formed using the past participle of a multi-word or phrasal verb. In these instances, the main verb of the phrasal verb takes the past participle form:

We had taken off.

Contractions

As with many of forms of English, the past perfect tense may optionally observe contraction rules where the the auxiliary verb had is often shortened to its final letter and joined onto the end of the agent of the verb with an apostrophe:

She'd finished the novel.

He realised that they'd seen the movie.

While such contractions are appropriate in both the spoken and written forms of English, they are more typical in the spoken language, where they are perceived as more colloquial and less formal in meaning.

Usage

As described above, the past perfect is used to denote a past action or even that occurred before another past action or event. If there’s a second action, this action will take the simple past form:

The fisherman had hauled in his catch when the sun returned.

By the time I arrived at the party he already had gone.

Sometimes, an event comes after the past perfect, wherein words such as since, by, or for commonly:

One old man hadn't left his village since 1993.

Those students had finished the quiz by four o'clock

Her parrot had eaten nothing for 15 days.