verb

verb part of speech typically used to indicate an action. English verbs are inflected for person, number , tense and partially for mood ; compound verbs formed with auxiliaries (e.g., be, can, have, do, will ) provide a distinction of voice . Some English verblike forms have properties of two parts of speech (e.g., participles may be used as adjectives and gerunds as nouns). Verbs are also classified as transitive (requiring a direct object) or intransitive. In Latin verb inflection , voice and mood are indicated in every form. Most languages have a form class resembling that of English verbs. In many of them, unlike English, these words may form complete sentences, e.g., in Spanish, "I am singing" is expressed by the single word canto. Some languages (e.g., Turkish) can convey a great deal of information through modifications of form in the verb stem and ending, without the aid of auxiliary forms. A single word, for example, can indicate reciprocity, reflexivity, necessity, time, infinitive, number, person, and voice, as well as negative, causative, imperative, and intensive meanings.

verb Linguistic category (part of speech) found in all languages, consisting of words typically denoting an action, an event or a state (for example, in English, to run, to snow, to depend). Typical verbs are associated with one or more ‘arguments’, such as subject and direct object. In English, verbs may be intransitive or transitive; intransitives have one argument (she sneezed), and transitives two or (rarely) more (she played snooker, she taught him Russian). Verbs may carry grammatical information, including: person (as grammatical agreement with the subject); tense (relating to when the verb took place); aspect (whether what is meant is complete or incomplete at some reference time); number (whether any of the arguments are singular or plural); and voice (which argument serves as subject). In other languages, verbs may encode different information. A list of all forms of a verb is called its paradigm, and this may be regular (predictable by a rule) or irregular. The most irregular verbs in a language are often those in most frequent use and with the most general meaning.

verb / vərb/ • n. Gram. a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence, and forming the main part of the predicate of a sentence, such as hear, become, happen. DERIVATIVES: verb·less adj.