What's past perfect continuous in English?

Past perfect continuous is a verb tense used to talk about things that started in the past and were ongoing until another point in the past. Learn how to use past perfect continuous in this free English lesson.

How to use past perfect continuous

You can make a past perfect continuous sentence by using the phrase had been alongside a present participle verb (the -ing version of a verb). Let's look at a few examples of this verb tense:

• I had been living in France for 10 years before I moved to Germany.

• We had been planning to visit my childhood home, but our flight was cancelled.

• They had been eating at that restaurant for years before it closed down.

Notice how the phrase had been is paired with present participles:

• living

• planning

• eating

Practice the past perfect continuous formula

Let's do a quick English grammar exercise to practice this verb tense. First, review the past perfect continuous formula:

had been + present participle (the -ing version of a verb)

When to use the past perfect continuous tense in English

You should use past perfect continuous to talk about things that started at some point in the past and were ongoing up until another point in the past. Often, we use this kind of English grammar to describe background information or context. Let's read a short story as an example:

In this example, the speaker is describing a problem he experienced in his previous apartment. He includes background information about how long he had been living in his apartment, giving us more context to understand the story.