portaverunt

Portaverunt is a Latin verb form meaning “they carried.” It is the third person plural perfect active indicative of portāre, to carry, a first-conjugation verb. The perfect forms are built from the stem port- with the a-stem perfect suffix -āv- and the personal ending -ērunt, giving portāvērunt or portaverunt. In classical texts the form portaverunt is common, while portāvērunt with explicit vowel length marks appears in editions that indicate long vowels; pronunciation is typically the same.

As a perfect tense, portaverunt denotes a completed past action and is usually translated as “they carried.” It occurs in narrative passages to describe actions that happened previously. Example: Milites aquam portaverunt. (The soldiers carried water.) The form is part of a broader paradigm of the 1st conjugation, whose other persons and numbers include portavi (I carried), portavisti (you carried), portavit (he/she/it carried), portavimus (we carried), portavistis (you carried), and portaverunt (they carried).

Usage and distribution: portaverunt is widely attested in Latin literature, including both early and late Latin, and appears in a variety of syntactic contexts—from simple past statements to clauses within multi-verb sequences and relative clauses.

See also: Latin verb conjugation, porto, portare, perfect tense in Latin, the 1st conjugation.