Pluperfect

The pluperfect is a type of verb form, traditionally treated as one of the tenses of certain languages, used in referring to something that occurred earlier than the time being considered, when the time being considered is already in the past. The meaning of the pluperfect is equivalent to that of English verb forms such as "(we) had arrived" or "(they) had written".

The word derives from the Latin plus quam perfectum, "more than perfect". The Latin, and other languages' perfect refers to something that began in the past but has not yet ended because it still has a bearing on the speaker's present situation. The pluperfect, however, refers to something that began in the past and ended in the past.

In English grammar, the equivalent of the pluperfect (a form such as "had written") is now often called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous) form: "had been writing".

The pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense; in modern linguistic terminology it may be said to combine tense with grammatical aspect; namely past tense (reference to past time) and perfect aspect (state of being completed). It is used to refer to an occurrence that was already in the past (completed) at a past time.

Bernard Comrie classifies the pluperfect as an absolute-relative tense, because it absolutely (not by context) establishes a deixis (the past event) and places the action relative to the deixis (before it).... Examples of the English pluperfect (past perfect) are found in the following sentence (from Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning):

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