Preterite

[Mark Kohut]

In an online annotated edition of Shakespeare from the late 1800s, the editors 
refer often to how Shakespeare uses an elided 'preterite' form of
a word......

The preterite (abbreviated pret or prt, in American 
English also preterit; aorist, simple past, past indicative, or past historic) 
is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place or were completed in 
the past. It is generally the perfective aspect of the past tense (not to be 
confused with the similarly-named perfect aspect) and may thus be more precisely 
called the perfective past, but in English, which does not have an inflection 
for perfective aspect, the term is used for the simple past tense.----wikipedia