Anthimeria

Anthimeria is the use of a word as a different part of speech from its usual one, most often a noun pressed into service as a verb — 'she elbowed through', 'he ghosted the meeting'.

She elbowed through the crowd. Elbow is a noun doing a verb's job, and the sentence gets a whole action out of one word: not pushed with her elbows, which needs four.

English has always done this. Shakespeare is full of it — Richard II has uncle me no uncle, where a noun becomes a verb in the middle of a line — and the language keeps absorbing the results until nobody notices. Google, chair, host, text, impact and friend were all somebody making a noun work harder.

Why it is worth a glossary entry: anthimeria is the cheapest route to a compressed, physical verb, which is exactly what most flat prose is short of. A sentence with a hidden verb in it is usually one verb away from being good, and the verb is often a noun already in the sentence.

The caution is that the device is conspicuous and fashion-bound. Corporate coinages — to action, to leverage, to solution — read as jargon rather than invention, because the reader can see the borrowing and can also see that a perfectly good verb already existed. The test is whether the new verb does something the old one cannot. Elbowed does. Actioned does not.