Verbification, or verbing, is the creation of a verb from a noun, adjective or other word.
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In English, verbification typically involves simple conversion of a non-verb to a verb. The verbs to verbify and to verb, the first by derivation with an affix and the second by zero derivation, are themselves products of verbification (see autological word), and, as might be guessed, the term to verb is often used more specifically, to refer only to verbification that does not involve a change in form. (Verbing in this specific sense is therefore a kind of anthimeria.) Examples of verbification in the English language number in the thousands, including some of the most common words such as mail and e-mail, strike, talk, salt, pepper, switch, bed, sleep, ship, train, stop, drink, cup, lure, mutter, dress, dizzy, divorce, fool, merge, to be found on virtually every page in the dictionary. Thus, verbification is by no means confined to slang and has furnished English with countless new expressions: "access", as in "access the file", which was previously only a noun, as in "gain access to the file".
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Similar mainstream examples include "host", as in "host a party", and "chair", as in "chair the meeting". Other formations, such as "gift", are less widespread but nevertheless mainstream. Verbification may have a bad reputation with some English users because it is such a potent source of neologisms. Although some neologistic products of verbification may meet considerable opposition from prescriptivist authorities (the verb sense of impact is a well-known example), most such derivations have become so central to the language after several centuries of use that they no longer draw notice.
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Verbification is sometimes used to create nonce words or joking words. In other cases, simple conversion is involved, as with formations like beer, as in beer me ("give me a beer") and eye, as in eye it ("look at it"). Sometimes, a verbified form can occur with a prepositional particle, e.g., sex as in sex it up ("make it sexier").
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In other languages, verbification is a more regular process. However, such processes often do not qualify as conversion, as they involve changes in the form of the word. For example, in Esperanto, any word can be transformed into a verb, either by altering its ending to -i, or by applying suffixes such as -igi and -iĝi; and in Semitic languages, the process often involves changes of internal vowels, such as the Hebrew word "גגל" (, ), from the proper noun גוגל ().
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Unlike Middle Chinese and the modern Chinese dialects, Old Chinese had a significant amount of derivational morphology. Several affixes have been identified, including ones for the verbification of nouns, conversion between transitive and intransitive verbs, and formation of causative verbs. Like modern Chinese, it appears to be uninflected, though a pronoun case and number system seems to have existed during the Shang and early Zhou but was already in the process of disappearing by the Classical period. Likewise, by the Classical period, most morphological derivations had become unproductive or vestigial, and grammatical relationships were primarily indicated using word order and grammatical particles.
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