ACCORDING TO BRITISH AND AMERICAN GRAMMAR PAST PRESENT FUTURE Tense: Any of the forms of a verb that may be used to show the time of the action or state expressed by the verb. (Oxford Advanced learner's Dictionary) Tense: Any of the forms of a verb which show the time at which an action happened. (Cambridge Advanced learner's Dictionary) Tense is a grammatical category that is realized by verb inflection. Since English has no future inflected form of the verb, that threefold semantic opposition is reduced to two tenses: the Present tense and the Past tense, which typically refer to Present and Past time respectively. (A Student's Grammar of the English language by Greenbaum &Quirk)