16

This is in very common use on the internet. I just read this:

"[The] hotel employee walks in, I say "uh, puppy" and she just NOPEd the [heck] out of the room."

This is often done by adding 'd to the word.

tchrist
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Jeremy
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5 Answers5

19

I think the term you are looking for is "verbification":

Verbification, or verbing, is the creation of a verb from a noun, adjective or other word. Verbification is a type of functional shift. It is also a form of derivation, and may involve any of the various derivational processes.

This is a process of conversion of a word to include more word-classes for the lexicon.
This applies to any non-verb, even "proper nouns":

Proper nouns can also be verbed in the English language. "Google" is the name of a popular internet search engine. To google something now means to look it up on the internet, as in "He didn't know the answer, so he googled it."

That's a favourite, "google" is.

Thursagen
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    I'm kind of disappointed that it's such a straight-forward term. Oh well, perfect answer. – Jeremy Sep 21 '11 at 04:27
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    @Jeremy, the truth hurts :) – Thursagen Sep 21 '11 at 04:30
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    +1 for Google as the prime example. You could have just told him to google it, and see if he caught the reference. – JeffSahol Sep 21 '11 at 04:41
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    "Verbing weirds language." is my personal favorite. – Joachim Sauer Sep 21 '11 at 07:13
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    I just saw this example and I was horrified:

    "The governor’s stay-at-home order turned downtown Seattle into a “ghost town,” said Rachel Marshall, owner of Rachel’s Ginger Beer, who opened a location near the Amazon Spheres late last year. Without a strong summer season, Marshall said, low-margin businesses like restaurants can’t survive. “It just doesn’t pencil,” she added."

     – Fauxcuss May 02 '20 at 21:20
14

As others have said, "verbification" is common. The highfalutin Greek name of the more general concept of using a word as the "wrong" part of speech is anthimeria.

See also Calvin's opinion on the subject.

Eric Lippert
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6

Verbification, or verbing. See Wikipedia's entry on linguistic conversion.

Kit Z. Fox
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JeffSahol
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6

When any lexeme changes its word class without affixation, the process is known as ‘conversion’.

Barrie England
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4

Actually, I believe the word you are looking for is anthimeria. From

In rhetoric, anthimeria, traditionally and more properly called antimeria (from the Greek: ἀντί, antí, “against, opposite” and μέρος, méros, “part”), is the use of a word as if it were a member of a different word class (part of speech); typically, the use of a noun as if it were a verb.

tchrist
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