preterite vs the past

preterite

noun
  • A grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past. 

adj
  • Belonging wholly to the past; passed by. 

  • showing an action at a determined moment in the past. 

the past

noun
  • the period of time that has already happened 

How often have the words preterite and the past occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )