Inbound message - So your definition is: The past perfect tense is a tense that shows that by the time something happened, something else had already happened ...   Exactly.   Print this and tape it to your bathroom mirror and leave it there for six days.   The past perfect: by the time something happened, something else had already happened.     ... with no mention of 'had' and the past participle?   That's because (1) its construction has nothing to do with its definition and explanation and illustration, and (2) the past perfect is always formed by had + the past participle but had + the past participle is not always the past perfect, e.g, all the hads-in-front-of-past-tense-verbs we've been over and all the forced-irregular-past-participles we'll get to when you learn to see had-in-fronts.   Remember "Call me a taxi. OK, you're a taxi"? You don't become a taxi because I call you a taxi and you can't make a past tense verb into a past perfect verb by putting 'had' in front of it. It can only be a past perfect verb by virtue of its function, not by what it looks like.   O.K. for now?   .brad.27apr10.