Definitions

1. verb

used to express a completed action or state

“She was a great singer.”

2. verb (past tense)

used to express a past tense action or state

“He was going to the store yesterday.”

3. verb (auxiliary)

used to form the past tense of other verbs or to express a condition or possibility

“By next year, I will have been living here for 5 years.”

4. auxiliary verb

used to form the past perfect tense of other verbs

“By the time she arrived, they had been waiting for hours.”

5. auxiliary verb

used to form the conditional perfect tense of other verbs

“If I had studied harder, I would have been a doctor by now.”

6. noun

the past tense of ‘be’ or a verb that is in the past tense

“The past tense of ‘go’ is ‘went’, and the past tense of ‘be’ is ‘was’.”