The nominalization of monosyllabic verbs

Gone are the days when ‘a good watch’ meant anything other than an horological instrument worn on the wrist that kept good time! Towards the end of last century, the older mechanical devices came to be superseded, though not replaced, by battery‑driven quartz watches (ensuring ‘like clockwork’ remained a meaningful simile). Nevertheless, ‘a good watch’ only ever signified a reliable timepiece. As they say, however, time flies, but as reality would have it, so does language, which is forever capable of acquiring new meanings. Hence, ‘a good watch’ has now come to refer to an event (a film, play, sports match, TV programme, etc.) that is good to watch, an enjoyable spectacle by another name. In similar fashion, a round‑robin email of 18 January 2025, sent out to subscribers to the TV broadcaster Channel 4, enquired ‘Looking for your next watch?’, offering a list of things for the viewer to watch next for their entertainment, and it still makes a habit of doing so.Footnote ¹ Furthermore, the noun ‘watch’ thus used (technically, as the head of a noun phrase) can also be employed negatively: for instance, the broadcast journalist and presenter Annabel Tiffin was able to warn viewers that a news report about to be aired on the BBC’s North West Tonight programme in December 2020 was a ‘difficult watch’. Similarly, sports presenter Gary Lineker posed the rhetorical question at half time of BBC1’s coverage of the UEFA EURO 2024 final aired on 14 July, ‘You didn’t expect it to be a comfortable watch, though, did you?’ and he wasn’t referring to a fellow pundit’s Rolex. No; here, as in each other instance cited, the verb watch has been used as a noun to articulate the activity of watching or, more accurately, the watched object itself.

The noun watch can also signify the act of watching, of course, when it refers to a vigil, especially one conducted at night. Hence, watch in the context described in the preceding paragraph, as an object of watching, can be more strictly considered a kind of internal, i.e. language‑specific, renomination (not an external borrowing), as opposed to nominalization proper.Footnote ² In short, though it has not been created from scratch inside the language, as occurs with nominalization, where a new word of one word class is created from an existing word of another word class, it nevertheless represents a linguistic innovation with respect to the creation of new nouns: fresh meaning has been added to an already nominalized verb. In addition, whereas most instances of nominalization result in morphological transformation involving affixation (largely suffixation) – for example, abnormal+ity, bla+ness, resent+ment, transform+ation, etc. – word formation of this type need not always do so. It can also entail what is termed zero derivation or null derivation, whereby the change in syntactic category occurs without any change in form, i.e. with nothing affixed (zero affixation); the polysemy of the language alone is expanded.Footnote ³ This appears to apply in the case here, although there is no real way of telling etymologically, whether, as with the chicken and the egg, the verb or noun came first; the assumption in most cases is that the verb is the root.Footnote ⁴ Deverbal nominalizations that lack any overt marking (zero‑derived nominals) are nothing new linguistically when it comes to monosyllabic verbs and the lexicon has many examples, as found in the collocations (in both literal and figurative senses) ‘a great buy’, ‘a done deal’, ‘a hard grind’, ‘a long haul’, ‘a close shave’, ‘global reach’, etc. Diachronically noun‑from‑verb formation is a very common occurrence.

Accordingly, the noun look, an intransitive verb, has for a long time signified the appearance of an object or phenomenon. Hence, we have ‘a good look’, ‘not a good look’ and ‘a bad look’ in the sense of the way an event or action looks (or not). The same applies to the verb read and so, alongside ‘a good read’, increasingly we have ‘not an easy read’. This change cannot be due to parsimony, since if we take the examples given for ‘look’, then we see that the nominal phrase is at times actually longer as regards the number of syllables involved (cf. ‘looks good’ and ‘looks bad’). Similarly, ‘good to read’, and ‘not easy to read’ are equal in length to the examples given above. This also applies to noun phrases such as ‘a difficult sell’ (cf. ‘difficult to sell’), which Channel 5 News, for instance, had occasion to refer to around 6.45 pm on 23 December 2020, while more recently we heard political editor of the Spectator journal Katy Balls on the BBC’s Politics Live (2025) of 27 March, in the matter of governmental welfare cuts, talking about the government’s approach making things ‘a harder sell’ for its parliamentary MPs.Footnote ⁵ Such instances are legion.

Interestingly, as regards polysemic development via renomination, the noun shoot, originally a verb meaning ‘to thrust forward’, seems to have acquired new senses as society’s technological base has expanded: from its horticultural sense in the agrarian past of a new plant or tree budFootnote ⁶, via the sense that came with the industrial‑scale development of the hunting rifle in the latter half of the 19^th century (as found in grouse shoot, turkey shoot, etc.), to a photo‑ or filmographic event, a photo shoot or a fashion shoot, which became part of everyday usage with the widespread development of photography and cinematography from the 20^th century and into the present day, when TV has become an ever present aspect of British life. Hence, not all that long ago the actor Christopher Eccleston could recount his experience of a ‘tough shoot’ (comparable to ‘difficult watch’) regarding the CBBC series Dodger on BBC Breakfast of 7 February 2022.

However, new nominalizations have appeared within recent years. Perhaps the most prominent, to this writer’s mind, is the noun ask. It first came to attention in the progressively widespread, formulaic phrase a big ask, as in ‘To expect the government to take such action is a big ask’, whereby the sense is ‘asking a lot’, analogous to ‘a tall order’. Its semantic and morphological proximity to ‘a big task’ has since led the more deliberate speakers in the media to revert to this choice of words. Such circumspection notwithstanding, since its inception, the expression ‘big ask’ has branched out: initially by employing alternative premodifying adjectives – as found on page 8 of the magazine Private Eye No. 1558 of 15 ‑ 28 October 2021: ‘[PM Johnson’s] promise of 50,000 more nurses for England by March 2025 is an equally tough ask’ – and subsequently through extending its range of meanings to signify a targeted request or demand. This latter connotation can be found, for instance, in the statement made by the director of a Scottish environmental consultancy firm prior to the Glasgow hosting of COP26 in 2021, ‘So the ask of the government would be to provide clear signalling that carbon reduction is valued’ (Scottish Renewables 2021) and likewise in that of a Northern Irish MP discussing financial energy support schemes for farming in 2023, ‘farming sectors have been left off this scheme, leaving them literally out in the cold without support. In the face of that cliff edge, the ask of the Government was straightforward’ (UK Parliament 2023), both of which statements are focussed on the onus placed on the government, the demands made of it. As with most common nouns, ask has adopted the regular s‑suffix as a plural. Consequently, government opposition leader at the time Keir Starmer opined in the House of Commons on 3 February 2021 in the matter of leaseholders having to finance safety improvements to high‑rise dwellings following the Grenfell fire, ‘Those leaseholders I spoke to had three very simple asks. […] If the Prime Minister is serious about moving this forward and ending this injustice, will he commit today to those simple asks from leaseholders?’ (UK Parliament 2021a). Later in the day, during the pandemic bereavement debate, Paul Scully MP stated ‘I congratulate the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) on securing tonight’s debate and on the interesting way in which he framed the three asks’, here in the sense of pressing issues.Footnote ⁷ Finally, an ask can represent the gerund asking. And so we hear ‘worth an ask’, meaning worth (someone’s) asking, spoken by the character PC Kelby Hartford in the BBC TV detective series Beyond Paradise (series 1, episode 5 at 30:15). Interestingly, the Online Etymological Dictionary, a search engine for tracing the origin of words, has no listing for the noun ask in response to a user’s query; the noun therefore represents a genuine nominalization.

Perhaps equally idiosyncratic sounding to British English speakers of a certain age is the phrase ‘a big give’, signifying ‘a lot to give’ or ‘giving a lot’. This was heard only recently on the BBC’s topical news programme Newsnight of 26 March 2025. Discussing the possibility of the UK giving up the Digital Services Tax with respect to its trade with the US, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Richard Fuller stated, ‘It is a big thing to do because […] there is a very big competitive advantage for American data companies, digital companies: they have a very pervasive effect not only on the impact on children, etc. but also on our ability to grow new businesses. So it is a big give, much bigger than perhaps the headline numbers would suggest for our future.’Footnote ⁸ The use of give as an alternative gerund for giving, however, has become sufficiently widespread for a British charity funder to bear the name ‘BigGive’, the operational details of which can be found at its dedicated website biggive.org.

There may be a good reason why monosyllabic verbs are prone to selection for nominalization, on grounds akin to those that formed the basis of the lists produced by the American linguist Morris Swadesh in the 1950s (the Swadesh lists), namely that the lemmata included refer to basic universal concepts that are diachronically stable. As Bybee (Reference Bybee2015, 217) notes, ‘In addition to being basic in the sense of representing basic aspects of human experience, the concepts are ones that are likely to be frequently referred to in conversation. Both features make the words for such concepts less likely to be replaced’. Though Swadesh’s original focus was on comparing lexical cognates across languages (primarily those of the Pacific Northwest) from a lexicostatistical point of view, contributing to ‘the development of objective methods for measuring elapsed time’ (Swadesh Reference Swadesh1952, 452), from the outset it made use of ‘a list of fundamental lexical items’ with an eye to ‘the percentage of retained words’(454) involving ‘relatively stable lexical items […] simple universal activities’(455), with Swadesh arguing, ‘Replacement of fundamental vocabulary must be slower because the concepts […] do not change fundamentally’ (460). By the same token, it might reasonably be argued that it is semantic basicness and stability – to say nothing of their familiarity – that enable monosyllabic verbs to act as ‘parents’ for homophonous derived nouns requiring zero affixation. Indeed, all the English verbs in Swadesh’s final list of 1971 are of one syllable: verbs such as bite, drink, eat, kill, sleep, swim, walk.Footnote ⁹ Čermák (Reference Čermák2002) is also conscious of the affect of word length, noting in the conclusions to their study, ‘The shorter an average lexeme is, the more polysemy the language has’ (246).

Further nominalization

Although, monosyllabic verbs are by and large the ‘natural choice’ for nominalization (including renomination), polysyllabic verbs are equally prone to the process. By analogy with a good watch, there is a good listen, as found, for example, in the comment ‘Hey, it makes a good listen’ left on the British ecological blog of Prof. Jeff Ollerton in response to his invitation to ‘Listen to an interview with me on the Environmental Professional’s Radio podcast’. Similarly, on BBC Radio 3’s Unclassified programme, released on 8 July 2021, Elizabeth Alker spoke of ‘a really emotional listen’ (at 28:17‑18), while in the ‘i’ newspaper of 11 August 2021, Gwendolyn Smith wrote about ‘a riveting listen’ (38).

The noun refresh is another case in point. Etymologically, the nominalization has existed since the 1590s in the sense of an ‘act of resupplying, refreshment’ (a fact confirmed by the Online Etymological Dictionary entry for refresh), a meaning which can still be found today in the notion of an opportunity to freshen up again, as in ‘to stop for a refresh’.Footnote ¹⁰ In more recent times, the word has acquired an additional connotation, borrowed from computing, of updating the display on a screen. This in turn has been expanded to produce a further iteration signifying any visual update or positive change in appearance generally. Hence CBM UK’s CEO, Kirsty Smith, could write in the charity’s newsletter ‘Disability Matters’ of Summer 2024 ‘You may also have noticed that we’ve updated our logo! We hope that you like this new look, which will be part of a larger refresh for increased accessibility.’

The nominalization reveal, according to the online Collins English dictionary, is ‘an occasion when something that has been kept secret or hidden is revealed’, particularly with respect to ‘the climax of a theatrical performance or magic trick’. Thus we often hear mention of ‘the big reveal’ as a narrative device, signifying the exposure to a reader, listener or audience of a previously unknown factor. It is in this sense that a British charity has acquired its name: operating in East Kent under the name The Big Reveal, it supports outreach work in music and the arts in order to encourage and unmask new talent, as it states on its website the-big-reveal.com: ‘The Big Reveal became a registered charity in October 2017 […] . The charity provides a range of music and performing arts opportunities to people in and around East Kent delivering everything from singing workshops for schools to full length orchestral performances for the general public’.

The examples of nominal creations given here are by no means exhaustive, far from it. Verbs are continually being turned into nouns to create new meanings, and there will be new nominalizations or, at the very least, renominations occurring at this very moment, as linguistic innovators see fit to employ them.

Verbification

In contrast to the observed changes above, the reverse process, denominalization, also features prominently in syntactic category change. The four elements of air, earth, fire and water, for instance, can all be employed verbally, as in ‘to air a room’, ‘to earth a plug’, ‘to fire an oven’ and ‘to water a plant’. And there are more recent examples of such ‘verbification’ to record.

The term ‘verbification’ (aka verbing) is preferred as an overall heading here, since verbs can also be created from other syntactic categories, notably adjectives (e.g. approximate, intensify, lighten, realize, etc.). The verb broadcast, to take one less obvious example, developed from its 18^th century agricultural reference to seeding, as a combination of adjective plus verb (broad + cast) meaning ‘scatter widely’, to its 20^th century significance as the act of transmitting a news item, programme or performance by radio waves, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary. By contrast, a more recent and increasingly employed example of such adjectivally derived verbification can be found in the verb to other. The verb clearly originates from the adjective other as in ‘other person’ or ‘other thing’ and thence from the noun phrase the other in the phenomenological sense of someone (or something) perceived as distinct from oneself. In its most recent usage, originating with the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), it has come to signify anyone (or anything) not simply different but also alien to the self to the extent that ‘the other’ becomes marginalized. And it is with this discriminatory connotation in mind that both the gerund othering (My Learning 2025) and the verb to other (powell 2017) are employed. Accordingly, speaking about the contemporary practice of vote‑seeking via demonizing asylum‑seekers, the Bishop of Dover expressed the view on television fairly recently, ‘There is work to be done, but we cannot just continue to other them’.Footnote ¹¹ Likewise, author and disabled activist Penny Pepper, writing in the May 2025 edition of Byline Times on the issue of disabled stereotyping as justification for cuts in benefits, believes, ‘The new manifestation of the disabled “scrounger” stereotype is underpinned by the self‑fulfilling monster of normality: that it is okay to demonise and attack us, to “other” us outside of humanity’ (23). While the terms ‘the other’ (sometimes written ‘the Other’) and ‘othering’ have been in circulation for many years, certainly in academic circles, it remains to be seen how far the verbal form becomes part of common parlance. Presumably, the more the activity continues to be used by certain sections of society and their self‑proclaimed political representatives, on the averred basis of a perceived social threat, in order to ‘subalternize’ (another derived verb meaning to systematically depersonalize and denigrate) other groups of people, the more likely the recipients will persist in employing the term and it will become conventionalized.

To return to the creation of denominal verbs: Michaelis and Hsaio (Reference Michaelis and Hsiao2021) realistically claim that ‘Denominal conversion has been the predominant method of verb creation since the 13^th century […] with the result that denominal verbs present a continuum of conventionality ranging from conventional verb‑phrase replacements […] to evanescent innovations’ (1). One such innovation (evanescent? – quite possibly) is the denominal to diligence. Though the satirical magazine Private Eye might have referred to it in 2021 as ‘millennial jargon’ and believed it likely to cause grammarians distress (Issue 1549, 14), the UK Parliament matter‑of‑factly records the evidence given on 27 May 2021 by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, to the Treasury Committee in relation to the Greensill scandal, involving government lobbying by former prime minister David Cameron on behalf of a financial services company (UK Parliament 2021b). Here, Sunak used diligence as a verb thus: ‘I looked at the issue on the merits of it, and so the identity of the person talking about it was not relevant to the amount of attention and proper diligence that the issue got and required. That was driven by the circumstances we were facing at the time with acute financing needs for small and medium‑sized companies. Therefore, it was entirely right that we diligenced ideas. […] Ultimately, we decided not to take this forward, but it was absolutely right to diligence the options […]. It was entirely reasonable and proportionate to be looking at this space and entirely right to spend time to diligence proposals that might have helped small and medium‑sized companies.’Footnote ¹²

Proprietary denominals, i.e. verbings derived from a proprietary name, are as commonplace as the products from which they derive their name. Hence, verbs such as hoover and sellotape, derived from the brand name Hoover and Sellotape, have become so ‘genericized’ (itself a verb form coined from an adjective) that they now signify any vacuum cleaner or clear adhesive tape respectively, regardless of the particular brand under discussion. Trade mark and patent attorneys do not like this, since it no longer makes the brands they represent unique and therefore commercially advantageous. By way of illustration, over 20 years ago, in 2003, the company Google sent out cease‑and‑desist letters to various parties with a view to preventing genericization by using the verb as a short form for searching online for information, especially when written in lower case. Reporting on this action, Jonathan Duffy penned an article for BBC News Online, which led with the question ‘Google is now a verb, meaning to search. It sounds like the ultimate compliment to the company, so why do its lawyers want to keep the word out of our dictionaries?’ (Duffy Reference Duffy2003). While the reason might be the profit motive, despite the action taken by the company, ‘google’ has become the common expression nowadays for searching for information about someone or something on the Internet using the search engine Google or, indeed, any other search engine. Common orthographic practice likewise tends to be google.

It is clear that many neologistic denominals have their origins in the digital technology of the Internet and the smartphone. Akin to Google/google, but more specific, is the verb to WhatsApp, referring to use of the smartphone application that allows people to contact each other privately by calling, sending messages (person‑to‑person or as a group), as well as upload and download images and videos. Since people tend to use the denominal verbally, as in ‘WhatsApp me the dates, will you?’, the question of orthographic trademark infringement has not really arisen, although, in all probability, this is because the term cannot really be used generically and most speakers are conscious that a discrete application is meant. Much more generally, we find the related, by now mainstream denominals to message, meaning to send someone a message by electronic means, and to text, meaning to send someone a text message. Finally, another Internet‑based denominal is to troll, which, though seemingly borrowed from Norse mythology as a description of an ugly, malevolent creatureFootnote ¹³, currently refers to the act of intentionally antagonizing someone online, often by sending them abusive and hurtful comments. Such is the extent to which this has become a familiar occurrence in the world of social media that the British government has labelled it an offence, warning that ‘Trolling […] can be prosecuted under the Malicious Communication Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003.’ Thus, the creativity of ever‑evolving language – and the English language in particular, especially in the area of conversion (Koutsoukos Reference Koutsoukos2021)Footnote ¹⁴ – proceeds in tandem with the creativity of the information age.

But we have not done there; other derivational types are producing further denominals.

Metonymic denominals, where one concept is used as a substitute for another concept with which it is closely associated, are also common. For some years, we have become familiar with the practice of ‘gaslighting’, the gerund of gaslight meaning to psychologically manipulate someone into questioning their own sanity, borrowed from the plot of the 1938 play Gas Light by the English playwright Patrick Hamilton, which was then reproduced as Gaslight, a 1940 British film by Thorold Dickinson (remade in 1944 in the US by Hollywood director George Cukor). The concept has become so familiar that websites have concerned themselves to explain it to the innocent, as found, for instance, on the website Young Scot (Young Scot 2024). A similar, but more recent, concept can be seen with catfish, meaning to create a false identity on the Internet for nefarious purposes, borrowed from the eponymous 2010 documentary film. A recent example of the denominal being used as a recognised term can be found in the title of an article that appeared in the May 2025 edition of Byline Times, ‘High Court Case Brought Against Dan Wootton Over “Catfishing”’, describing how a GB News presenter used a fake avatar to trick a man into sharing intimate photos.Footnote ¹⁵

Then there are so‑called nonce denominals, coined for a single occasion, as Michaelis & Hsiao (Reference Michaelis and Hsiao2021) explain, ‘A denominal verb is just as likely to be a nonce formation—never to reappear’ (2). And so we encounter the term to out‑Boris, as in ‘out‑Boris Boris’, as used by an online New Statesman article of 17 May 2021 in reference to the then Prime Minister Boris Johnston: ‘To win a majority at the next election [Labour …] would need to win back its traditional “Red Wall” seats in the north and Midlands, but there is no way Starmer can offer them more money, attention, charisma, faux‑patriotism and anti‑wokery than our populist Prime Minister is already doing. He can’t possibly out‑Boris Boris’ (New Statesman 2021). However, though this might seem to have been a one‑off statement and thus deserving of the descriptor ‘nonce’ by dint of its originalityFootnote ¹⁶, this manner of describing beating someone at their own game, using their methods to your advantage, can be achieved at any time in fact by appending the name of the person (or practice) to the prefix ‘out’ of the verb outdo to achieve greater rhetorical effect. Thus, very recently, in a round‑robin email from the British pro‑European campaign group Open Britain of 6 June 2025, we encounter the eponymous verb to out‑Farage, referring to the vitriolically anti‑European leader of the Reform party: ‘The Conservatives are getting so desperate that they’re floating Boris Johnson as their party’s saviour. […] Many Conservatives seriously think that he’s their best shot at stopping Nigel Farage?! Even Johnson himself knows that’s delusional and polling just released shows it won’t work. Out‑Faraging Farage won’t win back the voters who’ve jumped to his hard‑right Reform UK party.’