past

1. 1.

   earlier than the present time; no longer current

   “time past”

   “his youth is past”

   “this past Thursday”

   “the past year”

   Antonymspresentfuture

   Similaragoancientbygonechivalricearlyerstwhileformerhistoric
2. 2.

   of a person who has held and relinquished a position or office

   “a retiring member of the board”

   Synonymsprecedingretiring

   Similaroutgoing

1. 1.

   so as to pass a given point

   “every hour a train goes past”

   Synonymsby

Other forms of past

plural

pasts·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about past

What does past mean?

past means "the time that has elapsed". That is the primary sense; the word has 6 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in past?

past has 1 syllable: past. In IPA it is /ˈpæst/.

What is another word for past?

Close synonyms include past times, yesteryear, past tense, preceding, retiring. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of past?

The recorded antonyms are future, present, future.

Is past a common word?

past is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with past?

1 word rhymes with past. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.