What is the origin of 'sleep tight'?
Read moreOne of the mysteries of the English language finally explained.
noun
GrammarA word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence, and forming the main part of the predicate of a sentence, such as hear, become, happen.
- ‘Many English words can be nouns or verbs, with the exact same English spelling.’
- ‘The first and second words could be either plural nouns or singular-inflected verbs.’
- ‘This could be a preposition, a verb, or a noun which does not in fact count as the ‘possessor’.’
- ‘We typically identify powers with a certain standard locution, employing the infinitives of verbs along with verb phrases.’
- ‘Kanji are used in writing the main parts of a sentence such as verbs and nouns, as well as names.’
verb
[with object]GrammarUse (a word that is not conventionally used as a verb, typically a noun) as a verb.
‘any English noun can be verbed, but some are more resistant than others’‘I hate the verbing of that particular noun’- ‘There are not very many monosyllabic English nouns that have successfully resisted being verbed, but faith is one of them.’
- ‘I grimaced alongside him, but in truth verbing is far from new.’
- ‘Like any kind of wordplay, verbing can distract instead of persuade.’
- ‘Another interesting example of verbing nouns, this time exclusively in Australian English, is the word 'preference'.’
- ‘She relies heavily on assonance and shows a fondness for verbing nouns.’
- ‘Instead of verbing yet another noun, can we just use the widely-accepted "surfing" to describe what people do on the web?’
- ‘It is often said that there is no noun in English that can't be verbed.’
- ‘Shakespeare verbed nouns, while the discourse particle "like" was common in some dialects of English as far back as the 1800s.’
- ‘We trace this verbing of 'medal' back to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and it has been in our dictionaries since 1997.’
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French verbe or Latin verbum ‘word, verb’.
