Verbing Nouns and Nouning Verbs

Does it make you cringe whenever someone says they tasked someone with something? Do you scratch your head when someone wants to know what the ask is or says that you need a solve for a problem? Do you run the other way when someone says they want to dialogue with you? If so, you’re probably like our listener named Alan, who called in to say that people at his work “keep hijacking nouns and turning them into verbs” while also turning verbs into nouns. 

This caller said that his colleagues often use “solution” as a verb, as in “Now’s not the time to solution this,” but then they’ll also use “solve” as a noun, as in “We have this problem, and it’s been really difficult to find the solve.”

You probably associate this sort of usage more with Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss than with Shakespeare, but it may surprise you to learn that some of these words are centuries old and, in fact, were used by the Bard himself.

'Dialogue' as a verb sounds like modern business jargon, but it goes all the way back to Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare’s play "Love’s Labour’s Lost," the Princess of France says, “But now to task the tasker.” And in "Timon of Athens," Apermantus says, “Dost dialogue with thy shadow?” And “ask” as a noun goes back a thousand years or more to Old English, though it mostly fell out of use and didn’t pop up again until the late 20th century.

English makes it easy to turn one part of speech into another.

Why are these formations so common? Because English makes it easy to turn one part of speech into another. Old English was a much more heavily inflected language, meaning that many words had endings to show gender, number, and case or to show conjugation. But most of those endings disappeared as Old English turned into Middle English, so verbs and nouns didn’t necessarily have distinct endings anymore. You could easily make one kind of word into the other simply by using it that way. Linguists call this kind of transformation “conversion,” meaning that a word is converted from one part of speech into another without adding any kind of suffix or making any other changes. 

So if turning nouns into verbs and vice versa has been a normal part of English for centuries, then why do so many people hate these words? There isn’t always a clear answer, but one possible explanation is that we tend to dislike usages that are new or that suddenly become more popular. For...

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