It has long been a controversial issue that English is a language of binary tense or tripartite tense. This paper aims to investigate the type of tense in English from the perspective of the types and expansion of mighty tense category across languages. The results are as follows:1)The mighty tense category in the world languages falls into three types: tense, tripartite tense, and multitense;2)The mighty tense in English does not fall into the past / nonpast type but rather the past / present / future tripartite tense, and in languages with a typical past / nonpast type, a clause with a nonpast morpheme may alternatively express present tense and future tense, whereas the present tense form in English does not has this function;3)The expansion property of mighty tense is a cross linguistic universal, which backs up the theoretical framework of mighty categories and their expansion assumed by Linguistic Inventory Typology.