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A quick quiz! Are these words nouns or verbs? 🔹friend 🔹text 🔹medal 🔹action Now keep reading to check your answer! Sorry, it was a trick question! In fact, all of these words can be used as nouns or verbs! Here are some example sentences to show you what I mean. noun: How often do you use Google? verb: I don’t know. Why don’t you google it? 💙 friend noun: I have about 300 friends on Facebook. verb: Some of my old students have friended me on Facebook. 💙 text noun: Send me a text when you get home so I know you’ve arrived safely. (Text = an SMS message) verb: Text me when you get home so I know you’ve arrived safely. 💙 medal noun: She’s hoping to win a medal in the next Olympics. verb: She’s hoping to medal in the next Olympics. 💙 action noun: It’s time to put this idea into action. verb: There are still some parts of the plan which need to be actioned. English, like all other living languages, is always changing. New words come into the language. Words can change their meaning. And words that start as a noun can later be used as a verb. This phenomenon is called “verbing”. We only use the word “verbing” when the new verb has the same form as the noun. So if I change “identity” (noun) to “identify” (verb) or “fright” (noun) to “frighten” (verb), this is not verbing. However, we can of course add -s, -ed or -ing to the new verb, like “googles”, “googled” and “googling”. Technology Here are some more examples of verbing which you might even have noticed in your lifetime: 💙 Skype 💙 Photoshop 💙 blog All these words are quite new words connected to technology. Because technology has changed fast, the language has changed fast as well. “Email” is interesting because it has changed from “electronic mail” to “e-mail” to “email” to becoming a verb as well as a noun! Words like “text” and “message” used to mean something completely different. “Text” used to just mean written words on a page. Then it came to mean a text message sent by SMS. Now it can also mean messages sent in other apps like WhatsApp or Messenger. And of course it can be used as a verb. Personally, I usually say “message” instead of “text” when I’m talking about other apps and not SMS messages. But of course, “message” is not a new word either. Its original meaning is a piece of information, spoken or written, which you give to another person when you can’t speak to them directly. Brands Sometimes brand names become verbs. We’ve already mentioned Google, WhatsApp and so on. Here are a few more: 💙 Hoover another word for a vacuum cleaner in British English (noun) or to clean the floor with a vacuum cleaner (verb) For example: I need to hoover the sitting room. 💙 Sellotape sticky tape (noun) or to fasten something with sticky tape (verb) For example: I wrote a note and sellotaped it to the door. 💙 Taser a weapon which gives an electric shock (noun) or to use this weapon on somebody (verb) For example: The police officer tasered the thief as he was trying to escape. (Also “tased”) 💙 Uber a bit like a privately-owned taxi (noun) or to book a ride with the Uber app (verb) For example: You don’t need to come to the airport. I’ll get an Uber (noun) / I’ll Uber home (verb). You might notice that I don’t always use capital letters for these verbs. Over time, as a word becomes more and more common, we tend to stop using a capital letter. If words have been around for quite a long time, we don’t use a capital letter for the noun either. With newer words, you sometimes see a capital letter for the noun and a small letter for the verb. For example, most online dictionaries now list “Google” (with a capital letter) as the name of the search engine and “google” (without a capital letter) as a verb. But with really new words, we still use a capital letter. I always write “Uber” and “WhatsApp” with capital letters, whether it’s a noun or a verb. I wonder if this might change in the future. Is verbing new? It might feel new when we remember what we used to say before. A lot of us can remember when “Whatsapp” and “Google” were nouns and feeling strange when we heard them used as verbs for the frst time. After a while, a new word, or a new way of using a word, sounds familiar and we forget when things were different. I’m old enough to remember when “e-mail” was a new word (and a new technology) but I’d forgotten that it was a noun before it was a verb until I wrote this. But actually verbing isn’t new at all. Here are some older examples: 💙 rain 💙 divorce 💙 drink 💙 sleep 💙 stop It might be surprising to think that these words were only nouns at one time. Now we use them as both nouns and verbs without even thinking about it. Apparently, Shakespeare did a lot of verbing and this was 400 years ago. For example, he used the word “dog” as a verb. In Richard II, he wrote, “Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels.” If a problems dogs you, it means it troubles you for a long time. Is it good English? The short answer, in my opinion, is “yes”. I’m sure you’ll agree from the examples I’ve given you. But some people don’t like verbing. They think it sounds lazy or uneducated. Maybe that’s because they don’t like change! But they forget that language is changing all the time and they don’t realise that people have been verbing for hundreds of years. I would advise that you think about the context though. Some examples of verbing sound informal so it might be better for you to avoid it in formal or academic writing. This only applies to the newest examples though. “I will email you” is neutral and won’t sound too informal because we’ve been using this a verb for many years. However, “I’ll message you” sounds informal and “I’ll send you a message” sounds more formal. Humour Sometimes people use nouns as verbs just for fun. You probably won’t find these in the dictionary if you look them up today. But there’s always a chance that a new word or phrase will be used in the media and will then become so popular that it’s added to the dictionary. “Beer me” is a phrase that was once used in an American TV show, meaning “Give me a beer.” A friend of mine once wrote on social media, as a joke after getting a qualification, “Now I can English!” I might say to a friend, “Shall we café or pub?” and she would know exactly what I meant, even though this is not standard English. More examples Here are a few more examples. I’ll just give you the meaning of the verb because I’m sure you know the noun already. 💙 table UK English: to formally present an idea to be discussed at a meeting or similar event US English: to decide to leave something to be discussed later instead of now 💙 plate to arrange food on a plate, especially in an expensive restaurant 💙 chair to act as the chairperson in a meeting. In other words, to lead the meeting 💙 verb! to turn a noun into a verb! I hope you enjoyed this post! One day, I must write another post about nouning! Can you guess what that means?! Would you like to get English lessons and learning tips sent straight to your email inbox? You can sign up for my newsletters here:  Comments are closed.
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