verb

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English verbe,^[2][3] borrowed from Old French verbe (“word; verb”), and directly borrowed from Latin verbum (“word, verb”).^{[4][5][6][7][8]} The French word meant "spoken word, speech" from the 11th century and "verb" by 1174,^[4] and the Anglo-Norman one is recorded from the second quarter of the 13th century for a verb and for the word of God.^[9] The Latin word originally meant simply "word";^[10][2] its grammatical sense is a loan translation of Ancient Greek ῥῆμα (rhêma, “that which is said, word; verb”).^[3][11][12] It comes from the same Indo-European base as word,^[4][13][14] which Etymonline gives as Proto-Indo-European *were- (“to speak”),^[6] Klein as *werdh-^[3] and Wiktionary as *werdʰo-.^[1] It is thus cognate with Gothic 𐍅𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌳 (waurd), Old English word and Lithuanian vardas (“name”).^[6][3] Compare Spanish verbo, Portuguese verbo and Italian verbo, which also meant "word" before "verb".^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

The grammatical sense, a word that expresses an action or a state, is the first: before 1397 in the Wycliffe Bible according to Barnhart,^[2] before 1398 in Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus according to the OED.^[4] Etymonline dates a sense "a word" to the late 14th century,^[6] but the OED's only example of it is from about 1716.^[4]

Semantic evolution

Before the word was borrowed, Ælfric's Old English Grammar already used the Latin term, explaining it as "Verbvm is word, and word getacnað weorc oððe ðrowunge oððe geþafunge" (a verb is a word, and the word signifies doing, suffering or allowing).^[4] English kept the narrow grammatical sense; the older Latin sense "word" survives in verbal, verbiage and verbose.^[10][6] Johnson (1755) defined it as "a part of speech signifying existence, or some modification thereof, as action, passion".^[15] From 1730, in Fielding, the word was used figuratively for activity or action as opposed to a state or thing.^[4] As a verb, formed from the noun, it meant to use verbs in a text in 1900; since 1928 it has meant to turn a word, especially a noun, into a verb.^[4] In computing a verb is also a named command that performs an operation on an object.^[1]

Timeline

• Old English – Latin verbum in Ælfric's Grammar.^[4]
• before 1397 – verbe, in the Wycliffe Bible.^[2]
• before 1398 – the part of speech, in Trevisa.^[4]
• c. 1716 – any word (now obsolete).^[4]
• 1730 – figurative, of action or activity.^[4]
• 1755 – Johnson defines the part of speech.^[15]
• 1900 – verb, to use verbs in a text (obsolete).^[4]
• 1928 – verb, to turn a word into a verb.^[4]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. (grammar) A word that expresses an action, an occurrence or a state, and forms the core of the predicate of a sentence, such as walk or be.
2. (linguistics) A word or group of words that acts as the predicate of a sentence or begins it.
3. An action, as opposed to a quality or thing: For him, friendship was a verb.
4. (computing) A named command that carries out an operation on an object.

Verb

1. To use a word, especially a noun, as a verb: Many brand names get verbed sooner or later.

Word family

• verbless
• deverbative
• verbid
• adverb
• preverb
• pro-verb
• verbal
• auxiliary verb

Related words

• word
• verbatim
• verbiage
• verbose
• verve
• proverb

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
3. ^ a b c d Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ Barnhart, Robert K., ed. (1995), The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, New York: HarperCollins
6. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
7. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
8. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2), Aberystwyth University, anglo-norman.net (2nd ed., 2005–)
10. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
11. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
12. ^ Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
13. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
14. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
15. ^ a b Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.