The simplest kind of nominalisation

Nouns are really useful—and people have been turning actions and qualities into nouns for as long as they've been talking. You probably do it sometimes without even thinking about it!

Even so, it can feel a bit weird and unnatural when it's first pointed out to you.

To get familiar, let's start by finding some nouns that writers have used to represent actions or qualities and turn them back into verbs and adjectives.

Here’s the snippet from the previous page, but instead of highlighting the entire noun group, let's highlight the specific nouns that represent actions and qualities.

We’ll call them the core nominalisations. Can you find them, and could convert them back into verbs or adjectives?

Communications between the tribes of the New World were slow, and news of the Europeans’ barbarities rarely overtook the rapid spread of new conquests and settlements.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee(1970)

Every one of these nouns could be turned back into a verb or adjective pretty easily!

Communications → Communicate (v.)
Barbarities → Barbaric (adj.)
Spread → Spread (v.)
Conquests → Conquer (v.)
Settlements → Settle (v.)

Here's another snippet. Can you identify all the core nominalisations?

Exploitation of valuable trees in the Republic increased in the 1860s and 1870s, resulting already then in some local depletion or extinction of valuable tree species.

Collapse(2005)

Convert these core nominalisations back into verbs or adjectives.

Exploitation → Exploit (v.)

Depletion → Deplete (v.)

Extinction → Extinct (adj.)

These nouns all have a -tion ending. Adding -tion is a really common way of making nouns out of processes and qualities.

Here's another.

It taught men that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty can be a tool of greed and crime.

The Lessons of History(1968)

Convert these core nominalisations back into verbs or adjectives.

Patriotism → Patriotic (adj.)

Loyalty → Loyal (adj.)

Greed → Greedy (adj.)

“Crime” is interesting here. It is a nominalisation. When you picture crime in your mind, you’re probably picturing people doing things—picking pockets, hacking computers, selling strange things in dark alleys…

We haven’t highlighted it as a core nominalisation for this exercise because… well… it’s such an old nominalisation that we’d have to go back to ancient Latin to get the verb it comes from: cernere (to judge) → crimen (judgment) (from Oxford Languages).

Like we said at the top of the page, humans have been nominalising words for a looooooooooooooong time.

If you’re reading something that feels dense and hard to understand, look for suffixes like -tion, -ment, -ism, and so on.

These will help you find the noun groups, which will then help you see how the rest of the sentence fits together.

Let’s try going the other way now. Can you spot three verbs in this sentence that could be turned into nouns?

Charles behaved in a more absolutist way, and had a lot of extractive policies, which made people throughout the country resent him and resist him.

Turn the verbs into nouns. (Extra challenge: Rewrite the snippet using these nouns. Hint: Change the first word from "Charles" to "Charles's".)

Charles’s increasingly absolutist behavior and extractive policies created resentment and resistance throughout the country.

–(Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu)

Notice how using nominalisations is far more efficient! Changing the verb ‘behaved’ into the noun ‘behavior’ is particularly efficient, because it lets Acemoglu combine behaviour and policy in a simple list.

Spotting and playing around with word pairs like this can help you build up fluency, which will help you use compression and nominalisation in your own writing.

Try practicing this with snippets from a history or social science text you're reading in class. You'll quickly get the hang of it.

Nominalisation

The simplest kind of nominalisation