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Aorist (from Greek αοριστός without horizon, unbounded) a verb tense used in some Indo-European languages, such as Classical Greek, to denote action, or in the indicative mood, past action, without further implication.

In other moods (subjunctive, optative, and imperative), the infinitive, and (largely) the participle, the aorist is purely aspectual and devoid of any temporal meaning.

In Proto-Indo-European, the aorist may have originated simply as an aspect of syntactic inflection, but later it probably developed into a combination of tense and aspect, a similar syntax being evident in Sanskrit.

In Greek, and Sanskrit, the aorist is marked by several morphological devices, but three stand out as most common. Latin, however, does not have an aorist. People commonly confuse it with the perfect.

The first is the s-aorist or sigmatic aorist, so called because an 's' is inserted between the root and the personal ending. In Greek, ακούω akoúō means "I hear", while ήκουσα ēkousa means "I heard." (Grammatical note: the first letter of ήκουσα is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal augment that marks the past indicative tense.) In Greek, this is called the first aorist, or the weak aorist.

The aorist's second marker is a change in vowel grade, a process known as ablaut. Indo-European made great use of ablaut to express semantic changes morphologically, in fact, English uses ablaut abundantly, creating such verb forms as: swim, swam, swum; come, came, come; and take, took, taken. English further uses ablaut in extended forms, such as: sit, seat, sat, set (etymologically, to set is to cause to sit); lie, lay, lain, laid, layed, layer; and sing, sang, sung, song. And Greek λείπω leípō "I leave", but έλιπον élipon "I left". In Greek, this is called the second aorist or the strong aorist.

The third marker of the aorist is reduplication. While a reduplication is more commonly associated with the morphology of the perfect, there are sporadic verbs which use it in the aorist. The reduplicated aorist is more common in Sanskrit than in other Indo-European languages, but an example in Greek is the verb άγω ágō "I lead", which has the aorist ήγαγον ēgagon "I led," (Grammatical note: the first letter of ήγαγον is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal augment that marks the past indicative tense.)

• Ancient Greek grammar: Dependence of moods and tenses
• Grammatical aspect
• Grammatical tense
• imperfective aspect
• perfective aspect

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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• Greek tenses