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What is the past tense word of the word concept? In MS Outlook, I used this sentence and it's complaining to me.

The peer tool was initially concepted in 2006 for Dr. T.

Robert
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5 Answers5

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The verb form is originally conceive.

Verb
conceive (third-person singular simple present conceives, present participle conceiving, simple past and past participle conceived)
-(transitive) To develop an idea.
-(transitive) To understand someone.
-(intransitive or transitive) To become pregnant.

The word you want to use is

conceived

as in

The peer tool was initially conceived in 2006.

Conceptualize is often regarded as corporate-speak, so it may or may not be appropriate in all contexts, but it has been around since the late 19th century.

Mitch
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Mark Beadles
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Concept is a noun, not a verb. What you're looking for is conceptualize; and thus:

The peer tool was initially conceptualized in 2006.

As the Wiktionary says about conceptualize:

Verb

  1. To interpret a phenomenon by forming a concept
  2. To conceive the idea for something
Frantisek
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    Does "conceptualize" have any advantage at all over "conceive"? – Russell Borogove Feb 23 '12 at 22:23
  • "conceptualize" sounds horrific! It sounds like someone is trying to make words with more syllables than necessary to make them sound more intelligent, but just comes over as pretentious. – Colin Mackay Sep 25 '17 at 14:21
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All existing answers seem to restrict themselves to pointing out that concept is a noun, and that the "correct" verb form is to conceive, but clearly OP's usage is an instance of verbification (or verbing) - the creation of a verb from a noun, adjective or other word.

In this specific case, the past tense is concepted, as shown by over 3000 written instances in Google Books. The general rule for almost all verbs created by this process is that they will be regular verbs (they will adopt -s, -ed, -ing to form singular present tense, past tense, and present participle). This is because irregular verbs are on the wane, and new irregular forms appear only infrequently.

Community
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FumbleFingers
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    That's interesting from a theoretical viewpoint, but in practical terms it may not be best to advise the questioner to use the form "concepted". Google Ngrams show that "conceptualized" is indeed gaining on "conceived", but "concepted" is quite rare indeed. If the questioner wants to be understood without stigma, he would be best advised to use one of the other choices at present. – Mark Beadles Feb 23 '12 at 21:42
  • @Mark Beadles: ELU seems not to have a coherent position on whether its primary purpose is to explore the more subtle aspects of English usage, or to act as a "study aid" to help non-native speakers learn the rudiments. My answer does at least obliquely acknowledge the latter, but I really think the site is drifting rapidly "downmarket". – FumbleFingers Feb 23 '12 at 21:59
  • @FumbleFingers ELU is definitely a lot more of an ESL site than it was a year ago. I don’t know what to do about it. It’s probably some deep moral failure on my part that I even let that bother me. But it does. Seems to me this comes up on meta. – tchrist Feb 23 '12 at 23:44
  • @tchrist: Well, I'm sure nohat is as literate as anybody here, but he seems to feel penultimate is too obscure for our current visitor profile. And nohat is a mod, so I imagine what he thinks has more influence than thee and me! – FumbleFingers Feb 24 '12 at 00:30
  • @FumbleFingers I actually think of penultimate of as a perfectly normal word. The problem is that it doesn’t work to translate penúltimo from PT or ES to it, because there is has a common register but in EN it has an elevated one. But I also thought we weren’t here to do translations, so I dunno. We spend all our time answering, or closing, really really dumb questions that anybody could have and should have looked up on their own, or else are a bunch of South Asians trying to get their non-standard dialectal variations validated as standard English. Seems a waste. – tchrist Feb 24 '12 at 01:07
  • @tchrist hey now, don't misinterpret what I wrote. Regarding "penultimate" I advised writers to consider whether or not everyone in their audience understanding is important in choosing to use a word like "penultimate" or not. I didn't say anything about our audience on this site. – nohat Feb 24 '12 at 01:27
  • @nohat: Regarding advice to OP himself, I think one should assume he's addressing a reasonably educated audience, since they're expected to understand "peer tool" (not to mention use of "initially" rather than "first"). – FumbleFingers Feb 24 '12 at 01:32
  • As for where this site is going, I think there are levels of ESL-ness. Clearly beginner stuff is right out, but I think that advanced learners of English ask some of the most interesting questions, and I think tchrist's answer on "penultimate" is both interesting, correct, and valuable—I even voted it up). Ultimately our goal here is to provide long-term value to the web by creating useful content. TPTB believe that the only way to keep creating that kind of content is to attract experts, and experts will only be attracted to high-end questions, so we must exclude low-end questions. – nohat Feb 24 '12 at 01:33
  • @nohat: Well, as I said earlier, your voice carries most clout on such matters. Personally I think tchrist's answer re "penultimate" would be more at home on linguistics.se. If ELU didn't have so much basic ESL/TEFL stuff on it, maybe things would be different. But to me now it just seems the site veers wildly between the trivial and the obscure. – FumbleFingers Feb 24 '12 at 01:38
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The Oxford English Dictionary lists an alternative definition of the word concept itself as a transitive verb with a history of usage dating back to 1603, with examples dating up to the present. They mention that the usage of this form is rare after the 17th century, but contemporary examples on line and in print evidence that it has not fallen out of usage.

concept, v. trans. To conceive (in various senses).

Here are two of the several references that the OED cites as evidence for this usage:

1864 R. Deuchar Brief Rev. Anc. & Mod. Philos. 198 The mind of Phidias first concepted beauty in ideal perfection,—and hence his perfect Venus.
2011 M. Johnson Here come Girls xxxviii. 216 I was concepted in Venice.

Additionally, concepted is listed in the OED as an adjective using concept with the modifying +ed, with some older examples. Here are two that are on-point for this example:

1899 M. Holt Satyr xvii. 345 The distance to be journeyed by the written document required time to compass, and death's scythe harvested between the time of its concepted questioning and the answering.
1904 Amer. Jrnl. Theol. 8 706 The whole content of this concepted order, taken as a content, belongs to the order of knowledge as distinguished from the order of existence.

magi182
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  • A good find, but does it list the verb conjugations? The question asked for the correct past-tense form.... (Also, if you can include the OED's information and one or two of its contemporary examples with citations, that would give this answer some extra authority.) – Hellion Sep 19 '17 at 15:05
  • This looks like an attempt to comment on the previous discussion. Please do not post comments as answers. Each answer that you post in an answer box should stand alone as an answer to the question. If you wish to comment on another post you can earn the privilege. – MetaEd Sep 19 '17 at 15:22
  • This is a new answer. Other answers neglect the rare case that is clearly documented. Any commentary in the answer is cautionary as the usage is rare, but self-contained. – magi182 Sep 25 '17 at 07:05
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"Concept" is a noun. We have to first change it into a verb, which is is "conceptualize", and then change it into past tense, which is conceptualized.

He conceptualized his vision of preparing for this exam.

Davo
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user203395
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