Skip to main content

grammaticality - Is "gift" accepted as a verb?


I have always argued adamantly, as long as the issue has been around, that gift should never be used as a verb. However, someone whose English knowledge I quite respect disagrees.


I’ve done some searching and I haven’t found a consensus; should gifting be shunned?



Answer



I don't know where you got the idea that gift should never be used as a verb.


Oxford Living Dictionaries



Give (something) as a gift, especially formally or as a donation or bequest.



Merriam-Webster




  1. to endow with some power, quality, or attribute

  2. a: to make a gift of; b: present.



Neither is this a recent innovation. The OED attests to gift as a verb since the 16th century:



The friendes that were together met [He] gyfted them richely with right good speede.



Some more recent examples include



They appear at banquets, and Richard takes pleasure in gifting them with luminous silks and rare Eastern jewels. (1931, The Crusades by Harold Lamb, via COHA)


I wondered, when the hon. and gallant Member for Argyll (Major McCallum) was speaking, whether the estate which has been gifted to Scotland to which he referred will become part of the Crown lands. (1943, House of Commons speech by Campbell Stephen, via Hansard)


In addition to potlatching, which is a system of exchange between communities in a social context often typified by competitive gifting, there was a considerable amount of outright sale and trade beyond the local community and sometimes over great distances. (1979, Washington v. Fishing Vessel Assn. 443 U.S. 658


Penman was gifted with a Grub Street membership card at a time when Grub Street had been decommissioned. (London Review of Books, 1998)


Our man watched the proceedings from 500 miles away in Scotland, but the gallery at Royal St. George's probably heard his groans as Bjorn took three shots to get out of that wee bunker on the 16th, gifting the Claret Jug to Ben Curtis and costing Hannan a touch over 5,000. (2004 Golf Magazine via COCA)


When the college gifted them the cottage, Eleanor was immediately struck by the difference between this shrunken dwelling and the other homes of Jericho. (2009 *New York Times)


Actress Mae Whitman, whose Arrested Development role as unimpressive Ann Veal has essentially gifted her with pop-cultural ownership of the word "her" ("...her?"), has bestowed her endorsement on Jonze's film. (2013 The Atlantic)


Just then, on Christmas of 2001, his sister-in-law gifted him a copy of Edmund Morris’s “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.” (2016 The New Yorker)


While Etihad’s annual report trumpeted the 5m passengers and $1.4bn revenue that its equity partners gifted it in 2015, the associated losses were brushed aside. (2017 The Economist)


Glasgow's Riverside Museum has been gifted a Tesla to showcase alongside its alternative fuel vehicles. (2018 BBC News)



The adjective gifted is traced to the past participle of the verb gift, from 1644 onwards.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.
Post a Comment
Read more