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My teacher teaches me that if one puts an - ing to the end of a verb you will get the gerund of the verb which has the function as a noun. Example:

mix-mixing,
understand-understanding.

But there is also another form noun to the relative verb. Example:

mix-mixture.

Both mixture and mixing have the noun meaning.

I want to know does every verb have another noun besides gerund. What is the difference between them? Can they be used instead of each other?

mplungjan
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san
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    But they do not have the same meaning. If I am mixing two things I have a mixture. I cannot mixture something. Also please note that the personal pronoun *I* is ALWAYS a capital letter, and there is ALWAYS a space after punctuation and ALWAYS a capital letter after a full stop. – mplungjan May 13 '14 at 06:25
  • Er, maybe morphology? Perhaps lexical word-formation? Maybe wikipedia got some pages related to this? – F.E. May 13 '14 at 06:27
  • http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37241/rules-for-nominalizing-a-verb

    try the link. you might find an answer appropriate.

     – vickyace May 13 '14 at 06:41
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    @mpl, he didn't claim that mixture could also be used as the plain verb, just that as verb-derived nouns, mixing and mixture mean the same thing. Which is still not true, of course. A mixing is the act of mixing things together, while a mixture is the mix (a third noun derived from the same verb) that results from mixing things together. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 13 '14 at 07:09

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The -ing form of a verb known as a gerund does behave very much like a noun; it usually has the sense 'the act / process of'.

Painting can be very pleasant.

Understanding came gradually.

But the present participle is also formed by 'adding -ing' to the base form of a verb:

I was painting the fence.

And true (deverbal) nouns may have arisen in the same way:

You've burnt my painting/s.

Not to mention (participial) adjectives:

There was a sickening crunch.

While nouns can have many forms (compare these with the corresponding forms of the verb): gain, house, worker, sailor, beggar, devotee, belief, composure, contentment, leakage, admonition, collision, dogmatism, forgery, conspiracy, protectorate, ignorance, vacancy ...

There are nouns (not including gerunds) corresponding to verbs in many cases; they usually have different meanings from the gerunds.

Edwin Ashworth
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Not every verb has a noun form other than the gerund. "To be" gives us the gerund "being," but there's no be-ment, be-ture, be-ity, whatever (unless I missed it). "Kill" is a noun ("I got three kills on Call of Duty today"), but it doesn't provide a new noun form other than its gerund "killing." "Dry" isn't a noun, and you can get the gerund "drying," but I can't think of a noun form.

I'm assuming you don't count adding -er as making a noun form ("killer"; "dryer") as that seems different. But there's no "-er" word for "to be."

English is irregular. "Establishing" is the act of establishing, but "establishment" can mean that, or a business, or the powerful in society. "Vesting" means putting on clothes (archaic term), but "vestments" are those clothes and the "vestry" is the room where you put them on.

Maverick
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