From absentee-vote to zero-tolerate: 26 backformed compound verbs

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last updated 8 January 2015

If there's one thing the English language is good at, it's making compound nouns. Whether you spell them as separate words (human resources solutions), hyphenated words (face-off), or single words (blackbird), they're everywhere.

Compound verbs, though, are a different story. According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, compound verbs are usually not formed by simply putting a noun or adjective with a verb, although it has happened with verbs such as speed-read and hand-wash. More typically, they arise by simply "verbing" a compound noun (as in gaslight); by adding a preposition (as in overcompensate); or by a three-step process that has been on the rise in recent decades.

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Step three: A revelation of the new verb by removing the –er or –ing suffix. This last step reverses the usual way that suffixes create new words: Usually it happens by addition of a suffix, but here the new word is created by removing a suffix. The name for this kind of reverse process is backformation. The same essential process can occur with other verbal nouns, too; for example, the verbal noun marriage in gay marriage becomes the verb marry in the backformed compound verb gay-marry (listed below). This example also shows that adjectives as well as nouns can be the first part of the compound.

To get an idea of how productive this compounding-reanalysis-backformation process is, here's a list of 26 such verbs, one for each letter in the alphabet. Some are older; some are newer; some are here to stay; others probably aren't. However, in these actual examples from the past two years, they've all been used to talk about current topics in business, politics, entertainment, or culture in general.

Neal Whitman is a columnist for the online resource Visual Thesaurus, and an occasional guest writer for the podcast "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing." He teaches ESL composition at The Ohio State University, and blogs at Literal-Minded, where he writes about linguistics from the point of view of a husband and father.

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