I suspect Bill Watterson was not actually a fan of verbing, when he wrote the above comic, given the second panel and Hobbes’ response¹. But I love it.

Typically in English, you can change another word into a verb with a suffix: ise/ize, en, ate, or ify. I’ll call this “verbifying”. Some examples:

Hospital → Hospitalize

Short → Shorten

Hyphen → Hyphenate

Simple → Simplify

“To verb” is to change a word to a verb without using a suffix. This is called Zero Derivation or Null Derivation in linguistics, the changing of a word to one class or another with no change in form. Many verbed words are accepted and common. “Access”, “initial”², “card”³, “phone”, “scalp”, etc. But a lot more nouns can be comprehensibly verbed. (Verbing of adjectives is quite rare.)

The fun of verbing lies in people’s ability to understand what the word means with little context. If someone told me that he yellowed himself, I would assume he painted himself yellow. Or if they “shirted” their daughter, I’d guess they put a shirt on her. Sometimes verbed words don’t mean what you might expect. For example, to “pants” someone is not to put their pants on, but to pull their pants down (usually non-consensually). You’d ordinarily expect “de-pants” or “un-pants” there.

Many (most?) words are difficult to verb because of the numerous possible meanings. (What would it mean to “cardboard” somebody? Give them some cardboard? Hit them with cardboard? Turn them into cardboard? Treat them as disposable?) But you never know until you try.

Names can be verbed, but the only examples I can think of are negative. Consider: “Bork”, “Zuckerberg”. Are people ever verbed positively?

Japanese has a wonderful, but niche, method of verbing words. Most words simply cannot be turned into verbs with zero derivation, because all verbs end in one of 8 “u” sounds. (うくすつぬぶむる, u ku su tsu nu bu mu ru. The other “u” sounds aren’t used for verb endings in modern Japanese.) So only non-verbs ending in one of these syllables can conceivably be verbed. For everything else, you need to add する (suru, to do).

Relatively few native non-verbs end in one of those sounds, and many that do can’t be realistically verbed for various reasons. But Japanese also has lots of loan words. These are typically written in katakana rather than hiragana. Some end in “ru” and are prime candidates for verbing. People will understand a word as having been verbed if you substitute the katakana ル (ru) with hiragana る (ru).

グーグル (guuguru): Google, the search engine

グーグる (guuguru): To Google something

A friend pointed out this MGS3 poster:

Above the game’s title it says ジャングる？カクレる？サバイバる？(janguru? kakureru? sabaibaru?)

The first word is the English word “jungle”. The second is a Japanese word that means “to hide”. The third is the English word “survival”. Each is written in katakana, and in each, the final ル is instead written as る and colored green, indicating they’re being used as verbs. (kakureru is already a verb, but I guess they were going for symmetry.)

Verbing weirds language, indeed. I suppose how you feel about that depends on whether you’re annoyed or delighted by the weirdness of language. I can’t get enough of it.