| Definitions | | verb |
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noun
- (grammar) A category of words that indicate an action, event or a state; in a clause, a verb forms the head of the predicate. In most languages verbs uniquely inflect for tense.
verb
- (context, transitive, nonstandard, colloquial) To use any word that is not a verb (especially a noun) as if it were a verb.
- a. 1981 Feb 22, unknown Guardian editor as quoted by William Safire, On Language, in New York Times, pSM3
- : Haig, in congressional hearings before his confirmatory, paradoxed his auditioners by abnormalling his responds so that verbs were nouned, nouns verbed and adjectives adverbised. He techniqued a new way to vocabulary his thoughts so as to informationally uncertain anybody listening about what he had actually implicationed... .
- 1985 Oct 13, William Safire, Invasion of the Verb Makers, in San Francisco Chronicle, p19
- : Others, come to think of it, would also choose , with no suffix at all: "Don't nouns" is an obvious fumblerule.
- 1996, Peter Brodie, Never Say Never: Teaching Grammar and Usage, in The English Journal 85(7), p77
- : You mustn't nouns, they remind me piously—as I think of Shakespeare's animal verbs (to shark, to spaniel) and his bodypart verbs (to nose, to fat) and of all the great verbs they have spawned (to beaver, weasel, ferret, buffalo; to stomach, belly, scalp, kneecap).
- 1997, David. F. Griffiths, Desmond J. Higham, learning LATEX, p8
- : Nouns should never be verbed.
- 2005 Oct 5, Jeffrey Mattison, Letters, in The Christian Science Monitor, p8
- : In English, verbing nouns is okay
- 2007 Apr 20, Dale Roberts, Rooting out bad language with a unicorn, in The Christian Science Monitor, p20
- : I nominate for banishment the verbed nouns "dialogue" and "language," as in, "Let's dialogue on this project and then do some languaging about our proposal."
- 2007 March: Erin McKean?, "Redefining the dictionary", Technology Entertainment Design
- : Any time you touch a word"you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation, you it"you make the mobile move.
- (context, used as a neutral, inspecific verb, often in, _, linguistics, _, and the social sciences) To perform any action that is normally expressed by a verb; for example, to kiss, to be, to think, to write, to disappear, to feel, to see, etc.
- 1964: Journal of Mathematical Psychology
- : Each sentence had the same basic structure: The subject transitive verbed the object who intransitive verbed in the location.
- 1946: Rand Corporation, The Rand Paper Series
- : For example, one-part versions of the proposition "The doctor pursued the lawyer" were "The doctor verbed the object," ...
- 1998: James E. Tomberlin, Language, Mind and Ontology
- : One case is where I, the reporter, want to report Madonna as verbing (I keep the verb neutral on purpose) Banderas.
- 1998: Marilyn A. Walker, Aravind Krishna Joshi, Centering Theory in Discourse
- : The sentence frame was Dan verbed Ben approaching the store. This sentence frame was followed in all cases by He went inside.
Etymology: From old French verbe, from Latin verbum ("word"), from Proto-Indo-European
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Full Definition of verb
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