Types of nouns
A noun refers to a person, animal or thing. Some examples are: …

tense | American Dictionary

tense
adjective
us/tens/

tenseadjective (NERVOUS)

anxious, unable to relax, or causing anxiety:
She was very tense as she waited for the interview.
The family was faced with a tense financial situation.
If a situation is tense, it causes feelings of worry or anxiety.

tenseadjective (STIFF)

tight and stiff:
Relax! Why are you so tense?
tense
noun[ C ]
us/tens/

tensenoun[C] (VERB FORM)

grammar
any of the forms of a verb which show the time at which an action happened:
"I sing" is in the present tense and shows action happening now, and "I will sing" is in the future tense, showing action that will happen later.
tense
verb[ I/T ]
us/tens/

tenseverb[I/T] (MAKE STIFF)

to make your body or muscles tight and stiff, or to become tight and stiff:
[ T ]He tensed his body just before diving from the high board.
[ I ]She tensed up as the car went faster and faster.

Examples of tense

tense
In this way tenses reflect the particular nature of the narrative act of fiction-making.
The temporal meaning of tenses is determined relative to that narrative segment being actualized as the foreground of the story, as its fictive present.
In general, they are evident and possibly sharp, with the roof_line generally tensed, while the accent_line can be sharp.
Rather, increasing use was concentrated in formal combinations where the progressive was already prevalent, namely the present and past tenses.
Her long-standing habit of tensing the lower back muscles was too ingrained for her to develop strength in her lower abdomen.
I also wonder how many past tenses he thinks it has!
Why should the comprehension deficit, involving traces, be superficially at least so different from the production deficit, involving tensed verb forms?
In the former, reflexive clitics do not agree in person or number with the syntactic subject and attach to the participle in compound past tenses.
Following this methodology, children in our samples were asked to generate the past tenses of low- and high-frequency irregular and regular verbs.
Our prediction is that the hierarchy of difficulty for the imparfait will be the converse of that for the other two tenses.
Children in both age groups differentiated all three tenses in the adverbial control condition.
Of the 324 occurrences of be, all but one were unambiguously tensed.
We stop ourselves from expressing a feeling by tensing the muscles that oppose the movement that would express the feeling.
Finally, the usefulness of the traditional teaching approach based on a decontextualised presentation of all six tenses is questioned.
Many akls will not be tensed, some are even round; in fact, the use of precise circles can bring to mind a world of fantasy.
See all examples of tense
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.