We admit: English is not the most logical language. If you’ve grown up speaking English, then many of the underlying structures of the language are second nature to you, and you’ll automatically follow the rules of syntax and vocabulary without thinking twice about it. However, if you’re learning English as a second (or third) language, it’s easy to get confused when words don’t seem to follow the rules all of the time. In this regard, English is a very flexible language, one that can be used in a variety of descriptive ways in prose and poetry. On the other hand, this flexibility can sometimes lead to confusion.

For example, we all know that nouns are nouns, and verbs are verbs. Two separate and distinct parts of speech, they’re easy to keep track of and use – except when they’re not. Look at the following sentence pairs:

The captain decided to beach the boat before the storm reached the coast.
The crew pushed the boat onto the beach.

The housekeeper forgot to mop the linoleum last night.
Before the party, I need to clean the linoleum with a mop.

He’ll help you bottle the beer once it’s ready.
When you put the beer in bottles, use a funnel to keep spills to a minimum.

The pilot was told to ground the helicopter so the crew could check for damage.
Strong winds will bring the helicopter to the ground.

In the first sentence, the highlighted word is used as a verb, while in the second sentence, the same word is used as a noun. The sense of the word hasn’t really changed, though; it’s easy to see that the word beach, when used as a verb, means “put on the beach.” But don’t expect all nouns to double as verbs! You can launch a boat into the ocean, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to “ocean a boat.”

The best way to become comfortable with this flexible-yet-confusing word usage is to keep track of words like these for later study. When reading the newspaper, a book, or an on-line article, make a note of any sentence in which a word is not used the way you expected. Use the Ultimate Vocabulary program to look up the word (the program has over 142,000 words in its database) and see dozens of examples of how that word is used in different contexts. You can use these examples to write your own sample sentences. After a bit of practice, you’ll be able to tell when a word can shift from noun to verb, and you’ll be an expert at making that shift yourself in daily conversation.