Hot answers tagged verbs
6
From OED:
x, v.
Pronunciation: /ɛks/
Forms: Pa. tense x-ed, x'd.
trans. To supply with x's in place of types that are wanting. rare—1.
1849 E. A. Poe X-ing a Paragrab in Wks. (1856) IV. 265 ‘I shell have to x this ere paragrab,’ said he to himself, as he read it over... So x it he did, unflinchingly, and to press it went x-ed.
I'm sure there ...
5
Valid word is a difficult thing to quantify. As I've said before, a word exists as long as people use it.
You say in your question that you have read it in literature, so therefore we must conclude that it does exist, and, given the context of its use, is a synonym for quantify.
The meaning according to OED1 is a synonym for quantify, chiefly used in ...
3
The usage stats from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English look as follows:
COCA BNC
speeded.[v*] 259 149
sped.[v*] 1607 302
So sped is preferred over speeded on both side of the pond, though considerably more so in the US. The interesting part is this, however:
...
3
Merriam-Webster Online gathers several related senses of take:
11 b (1) : to obtain as the result of a special procedure : ascertain <take the temperature> <take a census> (2) : to get in or as if in writing <take notes> <take an inventory> (3) : to get by drawing or painting or by photography <take a snapshot> (4) : to get by transference ...
3
Postponed suggests a temporary cancellation of an event, usually with a confirmed date in the future for reconvening.
The meeting was postponed until next Tuesday.
Adjourned is used in almost exactly the same way, though it is usually used during an event rather than before.
"This meeting is adjourned until tomorrow."
Put off is simply a more ...
2
"Go" isn't any shorter than "do" or "be", so you heard a partial truth. The whole truth is that "Go, do, and be are the shortest verbs in English".
None of the vowels is officially recognized as a verb: an indefinite article -- a; a personal pronoun --I; an interjection -- O (variant of Oh); a texting abbreviation for why -- y; and a texting abbreviation ...
2
Either one is correct, but the meaning changes. If the verb is plural, the which refers to the events. The events allow me to learn:
"My work requires me to be at different areas for different events which allow me to learn ..."
Another way to say this:
"My work requires me to be at different areas for different events, and these events allow me to ...
1
There's nothing technically wrong with "verbing" any noun you feel like, as long as your listeners understand you.
Personally, I tend to consider it a red flag that the speaker doesn't really know what they are talking about, and are trying to cover up that fact by throwing impressive-sounding jargony words at me. So doing that as an attempt to impress me ...
1
Mainstream has been used as a verb in print since 1973 (and possibly before), which means that it appeared in speech well before that. In a general sense the first citation they have is from 1982 and that used “scare-quotes” so it was a new sense then. But it’s thirty years old now, although that may still be too new to be universally accepted.
Whether it ...
1
The words "seeing" and "watching" can have subtly different meanings. "Seeing good movies" might imply that you have seen them advertised in a magazine or online without having actually watched them. "Watching" has a more specific meaning in that it requires concentration and to that effect is probably the word to use.
So ultimately do you want to say ...
1
The past participles (and past tenses) "speeded" and "sped" are used in different grammatical situations. When "speed" is an intransitive verb, the past tense is almost invariably "sped". When "speed" is a transitive verb, the past tense is usually "speeded" (although "sped" is being increasingly used in this situation).
Consider the Google Ngram for ...
1
We definitely take, rather than make photos, but arguably it's not just a random idiomatic usage.
Semantically, you usually take something that already exists, whereas you make something new. Most of the time, most people don't see pressing a camera button as a particularly "creative" act. The image being recorded is already "out there"; you're just ...
1
This question can be satisfactorily answered only if a specific context is provided. For example:
A: I broke up with my boyfriend because he was cheating on me.
B: How'dja know? = How did you know? because A's sentence is past tense.
C: Most Americans own AK-47s.
D: How d'you know? = How do you know? because C's sentence is present tense.
...
1
None of the single vowel combinations are verbs - 'A' is an article, 'O' is an exclamation, and 'I' is a pronoun. Depending on how far you want to stretch the definition of "officially recognized" 'U' is a common shorthands for "you", and are hence is a noun and noun/adverb/exclamation respectively. None are verbs, and the others are not standard English ...
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