verb

Etymology

From Middle English verbe, directly from Latin verbum (“word, verb”) and possibly or reinforced by Old French verbe, from Proto-Indo-European *werdʰo-. Doublet of verve and word.

noun

1. (grammar) A word that indicates an action, event, or state of being.
   The word “speak” is an English verb.
   In ſo moche that if any verbe be of the thyꝛde coniugation / I ſet out all his rotes and tenſes[…] 18 July 1530, Iohan Palſgrave, “The Introduction”, in Leſclarciſſement de la langue francoyſe[…], London: Richard Pynſon, Iohan Haukyns, →OCLC, page 32; reprinted as Lesclarcissement de la langue françoyse, Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1972
2. (obsolete) Any word; a vocable.
3. (figurative) An action as opposed to a trait or thing.
   Kindness is a verb, not an adjective. You're only kind if you do kind things.
4. (programming) A named command that performs a specific operation on an object.
   You can invoke the Properties OLE verb in many ways. The easiest way is to move the mouse over the border of the control until it becomes only a four-way pointer and then right-click. 1995, Adam Denning, OLE Controls Inside Out, page 321
   The InfiniBand verbs, which are closely modeled in the “Gen2” interface, provide the functional specification for the operations that should be allowed on an InfiniBand compliant adapter. 2016, Ada Gavrilovska, Attaining High Performance Communications: A Vertical Approach

verb

1. (transitive, nonstandard, colloquial) To use any word that is or was not a verb (especially a noun) as if it were a verb.
   Haig, in congressional hearings before his confirmatory, paradoxed his auditioners by abnormalling his responds so that verbs were nouned, nouns verbed and adjectives adverbised. He techniqued a new way to vocabulary his thoughts so as to informationally uncertain anybody listening about what he had actually implicationed... . a. 1981 Feb 22, unknown Guardian editor as quoted by William Safire, On Language, in New York Times, pSM3
   I like to verb words.... I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "access" was a thing? Now it's something you DO. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language. January 25 1993, Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
   Nouns should never be verbed. 1997, David. F. Griffiths, Desmond J. Higham, learning LAT_EX, page 8
   In English, verbing nouns is okay Oct 5 2005, Jeffrey Mattison, “Letters”, in The Christian Science Monitor, page 8
2. (used as a neutral, unspecific verb, often in linguistics and the social sciences) To perform any action that is normally expressed by a verb.
   For example, one-part versions of the proposition "The doctor pursued the lawyer" were "The doctor verbed the object," ... 1946, Rand Corporation, The Rand Paper Series
   Each sentence had the same basic structure: The subject transitive verbed the object who intransitive verbed in the location. 1964, Journal of Mathematical Psychology
   The sentence frame was Dan verbed Ben approaching the store. This sentence frame was followed in all cases by He went inside. 1998, Marilyn A. Walker, Aravind Krishna Joshi, Centering Theory in Discourse