Tense may refer to:
- Grammatical tense, a grammatical category expressing the time when a state or action denoted by a verb occurs
- Tenseness, a phonological quality frequently associated with vowels and occasionally with consonants
- Tense, a state of muscle contraction
Famous quotes containing the word tense:
“Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A pathological business, writing, don’t you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!”
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929)