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There's a natural tendency in English to use as nouns words that were originally verbs. Examples: I'm going for a walk. I'm having a talk with someone. Diction
by donaldc 14y ago
There's a natural tendency in English to use as nouns words that were originally verbs. Examples: I'm going for a walk. I'm having a talk with someone.
Dictionary definition or not, a google search for the phrase "a schlep" returns >60,000 results.
- mjn 14y agoIf the (recently added) part-of-speech tagging on Google Books is accurate, the chronology is the other way around: it used to be equally used as a noun and verb, but sometime in the 1990s the verb form became dominant: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schlep_VERB%2Cschlep_NOUN&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share= http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schlep_VERB%2Cs...
- dockd 14y agoA "gerund" is a noun that has "ing" added to it and is used as a verb.
- lepton 14y agoThe other way around. From Wikipedia: As applied to English, it refers to the use of a verb (in its -ing form) as a noun (for example, the verb "learning" in the sentence "Learning is an easy process for some").