Just curious if there is a term for this.
Never heard a word to describe people using it that way, but the action of doing so is called, and I love this, Verbing the Noun.
Verbing is right.
mohalo
What about a term for word that are self-descriptive? In addition to verbing, other examples would be noun, word and multisyllabic.
I’ll make up a word for that action—gerundizing. A gerund is the noun form of a verb, and it seems to be popular to make gerunds of any damn verb these days. Happy Fluthering!
Functional shift. In English, it’s also called zero derivation.
Verbalization, as opposed to Nominalization (turning verbs into nouns, e.g. the [act of] walking)
@Fyrius I love how the word “verbing” is an example of verbing. That’s awesome.