One of the mysteries of the English language finally explained.
A word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence, and forming the main part of the predicate of a sentence, such as hear, become, happen.
- ‘Many English words can be nouns or verbs, with the exact same English spelling.’
- ‘The first and second words could be either plural nouns or singular-inflected verbs.’
- ‘This could be a preposition, a verb, or a noun which does not in fact count as the ‘possessor’.’
- ‘We typically identify powers with a certain standard locution, employing the infinitives of verbs along with verb phrases.’
- ‘Kanji are used in writing the main parts of a sentence such as verbs and nouns, as well as names.’
Use (a word that is not conventionally used as a verb, typically a noun) as a verb.‘any English noun can be verbed, but some are more resistant than others’‘I hate the verbing of that particular noun’
- ‘There are not very many monosyllabic English nouns that have successfully resisted being verbed, but faith is one of them.’
- ‘I grimaced alongside him, but in truth verbing is far from new.’
- ‘Like any kind of wordplay, verbing can distract instead of persuade.’
- ‘Another interesting example of verbing nouns, this time exclusively in Australian English, is the word 'preference'.’
- ‘She relies heavily on assonance and shows a fondness for verbing nouns.’
- ‘Instead of verbing yet another noun, can we just use the widely-accepted "surfing" to describe what people do on the web?’
- ‘It is often said that there is no noun in English that can't be verbed.’
- ‘Shakespeare verbed nouns, while the discourse particle "like" was common in some dialects of English as far back as the 1800s.’
- ‘We trace this verbing of 'medal' back to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and it has been in our dictionaries since 1997.’
Late Middle English: from Old French verbe or Latin verbum ‘word, verb’.
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