Pluperfect tense

The Pluperfect tense describes an action which is completed and which has consequences/relevance or has resulted in some state which is yet some time past from the point of view of the speaker. This is like the Perfect tense but pushed further back in time. In the Perfect tense, the consequence/relevance/resultant state is directly with or contemporaneous with the speaker. English has something like this, the past perfect tense and Greek pluperfects are typically translated into that. E.g. "They had gone into town".

The pluperfect tense occurs infrequently in the Greek New Testament. There are only 86/88 words, based on 22 or so (slight difference in count between grammars) lexical forms.

Formation of the pluperfect

 * Based on the 4th Principal part (same as for Perfect)
 * Has an augment (since it refers to past time) but this augment is sometimes dropped.
 * Has reduplication
 * Has a -κ tense formative (almost always)
 * Has a unique -ει connecting vowel
 * Because it has an augment, it uses secondary endings


 * Pluperfect verbs are easily identifiable because the vast majority of them have the highly visible  string. These are called 1st Pluperfects.
 * 5 or so words are not so well-behaved (2nd Pluperfects) and don't have the -κ formative but even so, the  string is visible. If a word ends with this, one might mistake it for a Present Active 3rd Person singular but the key is to look for the reduplication at the front.

Example paradigm
The pluperfect forms of λύω