ONE major word-formation process in English is to use the noun itself as a verb to express the action conveyed or implied by the noun, doing this without changing the form of the noun in any way. This direct noun-to-verb conversion or "nerbing," one of the so-called zero derivation processes in linguistics, has been taking place since language began. It has given English such basic action verbs as "eye" to mean "to watch or study closely," "nose" to mean "to search impertinently," "face" to mean "to deal with straightforwardly," "mouth" to mean "to talk in a pompous way," "elbow" to mean "to shove aside," and "stomach" to mean "to bear without overt resentment."
Indeed, rather than come up with a new word for the action that a body part typically can do literally or figuratively, the early English speakers simply made that body part stand for the action itself, and later on, they did the same for tools, machines, and technologies. It has been estimated that by this process, something like one-fifth of all English verbs had been formed from nouns.
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