New words enter English in a variety of ways. They may be imported (import); compounded (download); clipped (totes); affixed (globalisation), acronymised (radar); blended (snowmageddon); back-formed (donate); reduplicated (mishmash); coined (blurb); or formed from onomatopoeia (cuckoo), proper nouns (algorithm), folk etymology (shamefaced), or semantic shift (nice, starve).
Another important source is when a word in one grammatical class is used in another: this is called functional shift, because the word shifts function. A noun becomes an adjective, a verb becomes a noun, and so on. It’s also called conversion and zero derivation – because a new word is derived without any inflection or affixation.
Linguistic conservatives often object to the process. At every Olympic games, for example, people complain about medal being verbed, blithely unaware that the usage dates to at least 1860, when W. M. Thackeray wrote, ‘Irving went home medalled by the king’. From my A–Z of English usage myths:
Functional shift is hugely important for producing vocabulary and has always been integral to the health and growth of English. Not always predictably: schedulize ‘make a schedule’ became a verb in 1832 but didn’t take; decades later, schedule was verbed by conversion and gradually caught on.
Pretty much anything can be verbed, as competent writers well know. In the great western Shane, Jack Schaefer verbs seems:
‘Seems to you, eh?’ said father. ‘Seems to me you’re mighty young to be doing much seemsing.’
Let’s chocolate.
A.M. Homes, in This Book Will Save Your Life, verbs the phrase shall I:
‘There’s one in the kitchen. Shall I put the groceries away?’
‘Shall I’—where is this guy from? Most people can’t speak English at all, and not only does he speak it, but he ‘shall I’s.
‘Yes, that would be lovely.’
So don’t hesitate to change a word’s grammatical category to suit your expressive needs. As long as the meaning is clear and the context is appropriate, convert and play to your heart’s content.
With this in mind, I wrote a quiz for Macmillan Dictionary on nouning and verbing, two common types of functional shift. It presents 10 words used as both nouns and verbs, and asks which came first. After answering, you’ll learn a little about the history of each usage. You may be surprised by some of them. I was.
Let me know how you get on. And if you’re in the mood for more language quizzes, Macmillan has lots more here.
Quiz, incidentally, has been a noun since at least 1780 (in the now-archaic sense ‘eccentric person’) and was verbed soon afterwards, in 1787 (‘tease, mock’). The ‘set of questions’ sense and the related verb emerged some decades later.
Edit: The quiz is featured at 3 Quarks Daily and Language Hat. Comments on both sites report people’s results and highlights. (Result and highlight are proving awkward…)
Sentence first 
Really interesting quiz!
Glad you enjoyed it!
[…] More here. […]
Neat you were picked up by 3 Quarks Daily, Mr. Carey. One of my daily stops – as is Sentence first.
A pleasant surprise, Mr Johnson.
Must add that I got the reference to the trial scene in Through the Looking Glass that is embedded in your site title just yesterday. Feel a little silly about missing after looking in all these years. Off with my head!
Stuff and nonsense! I daresay many people haven’t made the connection based on just two words out of context – unless they’re very familiar with the book or have read the About page on this blog.
I recently read 4 Poldark novels ina row and the Cornish dialect (I don’t know how authentic it is) does a huge amount of verbing! I really enjoyed it.
The world of Poldark is unknown to me, but I like a bit of dialect in a novel.
I really enjoyed it, as I enjoyed the Welsh-English in How Green was my Valley last year.
As well as explicit peeving about the process of verbification and the resultifying words, there is an undercurrent of judgementification against the people who are prone to doing it – or at least are perceivified as prone to doing it, including the usual suspects: government, business, advertising, Americans and young people.
There’s been a discussion on Language Log recently about verbifying adjectives: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=38242#more-38242
True, and it can be more than an undercurrent: peeving about a usage is often just a way of peeving about the user or the type they represent. Thanks for the link – I saw it yesterday when catching up on language blogs (including yours).
I was trying to be polite! Even anonymously, I don’t want to say ‘People are blatantly judgemental’ (even if they are).
you are truthing.
I love the example from Shane! Verbing a verb form has to be the ultimate expression of this process.
It’s a wonderful example!
Fascinating topic! Perfect score, perhaps attributable to some good guesses based on a lot of years of Latin and German.
Here’s a question: in casual speech, we often hear adjectives turned into adverbs, but not the other way. Is it because the adverbs often have suffixes, and it’s easier to use the shorter form? (Answer quick, ok?)
Well played. As for adverbs, that’s one reason, certainly. I wrote about the history and use of flat adverbs for Macmillan Dictionary a few years ago.
[…] Another linguistic gem from Stan Carey for Friday reading: apparently, functional shift (I was taught that it’s called conversion) is still […]
[…] you enjoyed my quiz on nouning and verbing, you might like my new quiz on portmanteau words, now up on the Macmillan Dictionary site. It will […]
[…] a quiz on nouning and verbing that I made for Macmillan Dictionary, I wrote that ‘pretty much anything can be verbed, as […]