October 11, 2025
The conversion of nouns to verbs (to impact, to medal, to leverage, to architect) is a continual object of criticism and word rage. But language has been verbing for as long as it has languaged. In fact, there’s nothing that can’t be verbed if you put your mind to it.
‘What about someone’s name?’ you might ask. ‘What about Agatha Christie?’
I’m glad you picked that example. Because the new FX series Alien: Earth offers this great line in its second episode, ‘Mr. October’ (a mild swear word follows):
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humour, language, pragmatics, semantics, slang, wordplay, words, writing | Tagged: Agatha Christie, Alien: Earth, conversion, detective, detective fiction, eponyms, humour, language, language change, Noah Hawley, pragmatics, screenwriting, semantics, slang, TV, verbing, verbs, writing | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 15, 2023
The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these lines?
HBO just [greenlight] Season 2.
Marting said it [greenlight] less conventional works.
The lines are from recent articles in the New York Times. The first uses greenlit; the second, greenlighted. So whatever you chose you probably concurred once, but only once, with the NYT.
If you’re wondering which is correct, the short answer is both. The long answer – well, you’re in the right place for that.
In this post I’ll look at the usage patterns of greenlit and greenlighted, based on corpus data (graphs! lots of graphs!). I’ll describe the verb’s origins and analyze it with reference to irregular verbs generally and -light compounds specifically. Finally, I’ll discuss which to choose, with an eye on future trends.
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18 Comments | editing, etymology, grammar, language, linguistics, morphology, spelling, usage, words, writing | Tagged: corpus linguistics, editing, etymology, film, gaslight, grammar, greenlight, irregular verbs, jargon, language, linguistics, morphology, slang, spelling, usage, Vanity Fair, verbs, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
August 22, 2021
If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech.
I mean, sure, I can say ‘makes the sense ambiguous’. But there’s no reason not to have a one-word verb. After all, we have its antonym, disambiguate: to make something unambiguous. More on that later.
Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Without further information, there’s no way to be sure. The choice of conjunction ambiguates the sense.
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13 Comments | language, lexicography, linguistics, semantics, words | Tagged: ambiguate, corpus, dictionaries, disambiguate, editing, language, lexicography, linguistics, neologisms, semantics, usage, verbs, Wikipedia, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
April 22, 2021
In a recent post I noted an Irish sense of the word gentle meaning ‘enchanted or visited by fairies’, used in Charles McGlinchey’s book The Last of the Name. That book also features the unusual word spey:
I think it would be a descendant of these Dohertys of Keenagh who was a great harp player, the best in Ireland. One Christmas market he was going to the fair of Carn, but his stepmother, who could spey [foresee] and read the planets, advised him not to go for there was blood over his head. When he insisted on going, she killed a rooster and sprinkled the blood over him.
On his way to Carn, a fight broke out between Catholics and Protestants; Doherty stabbed a man and had to leave the country. His stepmother’s spey proved accurate. Though glossed in the original as ‘foresee’, the verb spey is closer to ‘foretell’: more clairvoyance than prediction.
Also spelled spae (which is how most dictionaries list it, if they do), or spay, the word entered English from Old Norse spá around the 14th century and throughout its history has been in mainly Scottish use. I’m not sure of the connection, if there is one, to spy, which comes from the Indo-European root spek- ‘observe’.
The Dictionary of the Scots Language shows how spae may be used intransitively (‘spae nae mair about uncannie things’) and transitively (‘spaeing folk’s fortunes’). Robert Burns used it thus in ‘Halloween’:
Ye little skelpie limmer’s face!
How daur you try sic sportin’,
As seek the foul Thief ony place,
For him to spae your fortune!
The verb gave rise to a noun, spae ‘prediction, prophecy, omen’, which is in much rarer use. The OED cites Sabine Baring-Gould’s Iceland: its scenes and sagas (1863): ‘The Finns’ spae is come true, so here we shall settle.’
14 Comments | dialect, etymology, language, words | Tagged: Charles McGlinchey, dialect, etymology, language, reading, Robert Burns, Scots, Scots language, Scottish English, spae, spey, verbs, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
January 7, 2021
After 10+ years and 215 articles, my language column at Macmillan Dictionary has come to an end – as indeed has the blog Macmillan Dictionary Blog itself, for now. Here are my last two posts.
Militate against mitigate looks at this pair of similar words, setting out how each one is used, why they’re easily confused, and how to remember the difference:
Because mitigate (reduce harmful effects) is sometimes like a subset of militate (have an effect), people often use mitigate when they mean militate. We know this because they write *mitigate against. Usually the writer means militate against, but not necessarily. Readers can’t always figure it out, and it isn’t their responsibility. It’s up to writers and editors to know the difference and militate against the error.
Are you incentivized to use this word? plays devil’s advocate for a much-maligned word, reviewing the usage commentary on it and showing why it’s likely to stick around:
Over time, we get used to new usages. We accept them grudgingly or even enthuse about them. Decades later, the ones that survive have become thoroughly familiar and lack the stigma of novelty. The verb contact, for instance, was loathed a century ago but is perfectly unremarkable today. Until that happens, though, these usages provoke contention, with many people looking askance at them or criticizing them vocally. So it is with incentivize.
13 Comments | language, usage, words | Tagged: incentivize, language, Macmillan Dictionary Blog, militate, mitigate, neologisms, peeving, usage, verbing, verbs, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
January 13, 2020
Lauren Beukes’s novel Broken Monsters has a short passage on business jargon and young people’s attitudes to it. Layla, a character in her mid-teens, is visiting her friend Cas and introduces Cas’s father:
Her dad is a tech-preneur. Name a major company in Silicon Valley and he’s ‘pulled a stint there’ – his words. It’s why they moved from Oakland, California. Detroit is friendlier to start-ups: lower overheads, tax incentives, hungry talent, cheap office space in TechTown. He’s bought into the city’s revitalization ‘with bells on’. Layla loves hearing him talk. It’s another language, where any word can be verbed. She and Cas have a secret drinking game they play during dinner, taking a sip of juice every time he uses techno jargon like ‘angel-investor’.
‘How’s Crater going?’ Layla asks him, trying to remember the name of his big start-up project.
‘Curatr,’ he corrects her automatically, rolling the trrrr.
Some examples certainly qualify as tech jargon or terminology: the portmanteau tech-preneur and the fictional brand Curatr, with its fashionably dropped vowel (cf. Flickr, Tumblr, Grindr, Qzzr). TechTown, meanwhile, is a real-life hub for entrepreneurship in Detroit, notable in this context for its CamelCase style.
Other examples cited – pulled a stint, with bells on, angel investor – are not what I’d consider tech jargon, but the passage is from Layla’s pov, so I figure it’s more that she has only heard these phrases from Cas’s dad and associates them with his industry.
Her observation about verbing applies to English more generally.
https://www.twitter.com/StanCarey/status/230738930729897984
But I suppose the point is that tech execs (and managers, advertisers, etc.) are more likely to do it with abandon, and that when you’re a teenager and it’s your dad or your friend’s dad, it can be a particular source of interest, embarrassment, or entertainment.
It’s refreshing to see this form of language, so often maligned, portrayed positively. I’m reminded of a cartoon by Dana Fradon included in The New Yorker Cartoon Album 1975–1985:
[Caption: “You’re a good man, Washbourne. I like the way you use nouns as verbs.”]
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26 Comments | grammar, humour, jargon, language, syntax, writing | Tagged: business English, cartoons, George Pelecanos, grammar, humour, jargon, Jenny Diski, language, language change, Lauren Beukes, New Yorker, syntax, verbing, verbs, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
September 29, 2018
I have three new posts to report from Macmillan Dictionary Blog, where I write a monthly column about words and language. Links and excerpts follow.
‘This is highly irregular’ showcases the devilish irregularity of English:
English is a famously irregular language, its grammar laden with exceptions to the rules. This is largely a result of English being a mosaic of different languages. To its originally Germanic structure were added heavy layers of vocabulary from Latin, French, and elsewhere, over centuries of use. This prolonged and complex mixing of influences led to the lack of uniformity we find in English verb patterns today.
Past tense and past participle verb forms are the focus of the post, which includes a brief quiz: Can you solve these, for example? 1. Once again the dog had [lay] its head on her lap. 2. He remembered he had [drink] the cocktail before. The point being, even native English-speakers struggle with some of these verbs.
‘Elementary error, my dear Watson’ looks at a well-known expression whose provenance proves unexpected:
Ask people to put elementary in a sentence, and many will quote a famous catchphrase by Sherlock Holmes, the great detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle: ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ (sometimes without the possessive determiner: ‘Elementary, dear Watson’). The expression, generally used humorously, has taken on a life of its own, with a separate entry in Macmillan Dictionary that says it means something is ‘very easy to understand or solve’. But all is not as it seems.
It turns out that in Conan Doyle’s 56 short stories and four novels starring Holmes, the detective never once says the line, with or without the ‘my’. I dig into the etymology.
‘Don’t belittle this word’: Sometimes a word is hated with a passion, by many people, for many years, and then new generations arrive and think nothing of it:
If you were told that a word had ‘no chance of becoming English’ and should be ‘abandoned to the incurably vulgar’, you would not guess that the word is belittle. It seems so ordinary and uncontroversial nowadays. But those quotes, from Fitzedward Hall in 1872, reflect real historical antagonism to it. ‘For shame, Mr. Jefferson!’ spluttered an article in the London Review, criticizing the Founding Father for coining it.
With all the anxious commentary now reduced to a quaint historical footnote, I review the word’s history and the gradual but ultimately radical shift in people’s attitudes to it.
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Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 