past tense

noun

verb tense used to express action taking place in past relative to time of utterance

A grammatical form (often a verb form) that refers to an event, transaction, occurrence, or object that happened (or had happened), or existed, at some time before now (the applicable reference time).
“This is a report on a study of the use of the past tense forms in the 53 Japanese samples compiled for the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) project.”
“As you have studied Spanish, you have probably had the feeling that there are just too many past tenses.”