A verb tense in ancient Greek and some other languages that expresses a completed action without specifying duration, similar to the simple past in English.
From Greek 'aorístos' meaning 'undefined' or 'unlimited,' from 'a-' (not) plus 'horistos' (defined/bounded). The name reflects that this tense doesn't specify boundaries of time like other tenses do.
The aorist tense is a linguistic quirk that shows how ancient Greek speakers thought about time differently than we do—they had a tense specifically for 'something happened' without caring whether it took a second or a century, which is pretty different from modern European languages!
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