Grammar

Past Perfect Continuous tense

1,940 fill-in-the-gap exercises across 4 forms

For an activity that had been running up to a point in the past. It explains how things got that way.

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When you need it

• How long something had run before a past point. By the time she retired, she had been teaching for thirty years.
• The cause of a past state. His eyes were red. He had been crying.
• A repeated activity up to a past moment. They had been arguing all week before he left.

The tense looks backwards from a moment that is itself in the past. Everything about it is one step further back than the Present Perfect Continuous.

The two perfect continuous tenses

They do the same job from different vantage points:

• I have been waiting for an hour. — the hour ends now.
• I had been waiting for an hour. — the hour ended at some past moment.

The second almost always names that moment: when the doctor finally called, by the time he arrived, before the meeting started.

Past Perfect or Past Perfect Continuous

Same split as elsewhere: the Continuous points at the activity and its length, the plain form at the result and the number.

• She had been writing letters all afternoon. — the afternoon spent doing it.
• She had written six letters. — what she had to show for it.

The explanation pattern

The most characteristic use puts a past state first and the cause second:

The ground was wet — it had been raining. He was out of breath because he had been running.

The first half is Past Simple; the second steps back.

State verbs stay in the plain form

Know, understand, believe, want, like, own, belong take no -ing. With them, duration up to a past point is carried by the ordinary Past Perfect:

We had known each other for years before we worked together.

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