What is "simple past"

n. (context grammar English) A tense used to describe something that happened in the past, formed by inflection of a single word (i.e., without any auxiliary verb such as ''be'' or ''have'').

The simple past, past simple or past indefinite, sometimes called the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms.

The term " simple" is used to distinguish the syntactical construction whose basic form uses the plain past tense alone, from other past tense constructions which use auxiliaries in combination with participles, such as the past perfect and past progressive.