Other forms: pasts
The past is the time that has already happened — yesterday, last year, everything before this moment. As a noun it takes the: in the past, a thing of the past, and somebody with a past, which hints at trouble nobody has mentioned.
It is four words wearing one spelling, and that is what makes it hard. Noun: the past. Adjective: the past week. Preposition: half past three, walk past the shop. Adverb: he ran past. The one to watch is passed, which is the verb — she passed the test, he passed me the salt — and no rule of pronunciation will help you, only the question of whether a verb is doing the work.
1nounpastThe time that has already gone.~67%
“In the past, letters took a week to arrive.”
2adjectivepreviousBelonging to the time before now.~17%
“The past few weeks have been difficult.”
synonyms: previous, former
3prepositionbeyondBeyond something, in position or in time.~8%
“The bank is just past the traffic lights.”
4nounearlierA person's earlier life, especially the part they would rather not discuss.~8%
“Everyone knew he had a past, and nobody asked about it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
past is a stretch of time.
Past is the old past participle of pass. What is past is simply what has passed, and the grammar of the word is the whole meaning of it.
Built from
From Middle English - passed, past participle of passen (“to pass, to go by”), whence Modern English pass.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA