Which tense is used in the sentence "He said that he had been waiting for ages before she arrived for the date."?

The sentence "He said that he had been waiting for ages before she arrived for the date." employs the Past Perfect Continuous tense. This tense is used to emphasize the duration of an action that was ongoing in the past, before another action occurred. In this case, "had been waiting" indicates that the action of waiting started before the event of her arrival and continued right up to that point.

The use of "for ages" further highlights the length of time the waiting took, which is characteristic of the Past Perfect Continuous tense. It allows the speaker to convey that the waiting did not just occur in the past but was an ongoing situation leading up to another past event, providing a fuller context of the sequence and timing of actions.