the meaning of "all this time"

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yuyu0615

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I have found the sentence"All this time his hands was busy hurriedly putting on his clothes."for the first time.In this sentence "all the time" is used in past tense.
I 've ever found the sentence like"Where have you been all the time?"(present perfect tense).
What dose "all the time"(in past tence) mean?
 
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Thank you for your reply.Does "all the time" have the same meaning as"all this time"?
 
I have found the sentence"All this time his hands was busy hurriedly putting on his clothes."for the first time.In this sentence "all the time" is used in past tense.
I 've ever found the sentence like"Where have you been all the time?"(present perfect tense).
What dose "all the time"(in past tence) mean?
I am not a teacher.

"All this time" is not really past tense for "all the time", but I see what you mean.

"All the time" means "constantly", often figuratively. From the movie The Sixth Sense:
COLE has said that he sees dead people.
MALCOLM: How often do you see them?
COLE: All the time. They're everywhere. ....
He doesn't mean every second, he means very often in every day.

"All this time" is the same as "all the while" or "during the same time"; "this" is idiomatic here. "Thanks for the Valentine's Day poem. And all this time I thought you didn't like me."

You can also say "all that time", meaning "during that time in the past", and "that" is literal: "Jason spent the summer clearing stumps from the field, and all that time he was missing Rebecca."
 
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