Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...

ONE major word-formation process in English is to use the noun itself as a verb to express the action conveyed or implied by the noun, doing this without changing the form of the noun in any way. This ...

One major word-formation process in English is to use the noun itself as a verb to express the action conveyed or implied by the noun, without changing the form of the noun in any way. This direct ...

We have two new entries here, both present participles of verbs that might or might not exist. First is “efforting.” YourDictionary.com has one of the few online definitions, which consists entirely ...

People have been turning nouns into verbs for centuries – so why does it grate so much? Brandon Ambrosino takes a look. While many of us in the northern hemisphere may have been away somewhere nice ...

Health care, healthcare or health-care? Make up, makeup or make-up? Water ski, water-ski or waterski? Cell phone, cellphone or cell-phone? A lot of questions posed in this column elicit the answer: ...

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 90+ Q&A sites.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Don’t know about you, but I think we’re having an “overwhelm” of “overwhelm” used as a noun. “Overwhelm” is ...

ONE major word-formation process in English is to use the noun itself as a verb to express the action conveyed or implied by the noun, but without changing in any way the form of the noun. This direct ...