Dictionary

nominalization en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (Southern-England) audio

Etymology

From nominal + -ization, or nominalize + -ation.

Meanings

1. (British, English, Oxford, US, countable) A noun derived from an adjective, verb, etc., often (in English) by adding a suffix such as -ity, -tion or -ism.
   • All words have argument structures. The argument structure of many nouns—such as names—is empty: We don’t need other words to complete them. But singular count nouns need a determiner to the left. And nominalizations of verbs have argument structures to follow. For example, a noun like destruction has a similar argument structure as its corresponding verb destroy: […] 2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Grammar” (chapter 3), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 77:
   • Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract. 2012 July 23, Helen Sword, “Zombie Nouns”, in NY Times:
2. (British, English, Oxford, US, uncountable) The act or process of nominalizing; the use of such a noun.
   • The positive use of the feminine noun une rien has been gradually replaced by the nominalization of the pronoun and the adverb that commonly serve as negative auxiliaries, rien, un rien: “The word offers a short version of the evolution of the etymological meaning of chose inverted as néant (c. 1530)” (RT: DHLF)[…] 2014 February 9, Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 722:
   • Nominalization is a common feature of a more scientific style of writing and is used as an additional measure for syntactic complexity. 2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays”, in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 5:
   • Nominalization and agentless passives have attracted sustained attention in critical linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), where, it is argued, they ‘mystify’, i.e., reduce reader comprehension of, the role of social actors in depictions of events, particularly in news media discourse. 2017 April 14, William Alan Lingle, Nominalizations, Agentless Passives, and Social Actor Mystification: Newspaper Editorials on the Greek Financial Crisis:

Forms

Deriveds

nominalizer · agentive nominalization · agentive nominalisation

Synonyms

substantivisation · nounification · substantivation

Translations (41)

pl nominalizacja (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · da substantivering (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · ru номинализа́ция (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · de Substantivierung (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · es substantivación (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · fr nominalisation (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · fi nominalisaatio (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · nl nominalisatie (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · cs substantivizace (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · gl nominalización (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · nl substantivering (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · pl substantywizacja (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · cmn 名詞化 /名词化 (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · it nominalizzazione (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · de Nominalisierung (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · ru субстантива́ция (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · de Hauptwortbildung (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · mn ᠨᠡᠷᠡᠰᠢᠬᠦᠢ (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · mn ᠨᠡᠷᠡᠰᠢᠯ (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · mn нэршихүй (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · ja 名詞化 (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · it sostantivazione (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · vi danh từ hoá (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · eo substantivigo (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · az isimləşmə (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · id nominalisasi (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · ko 명사화 (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · lv nominalizācija (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · no substantivering (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · es nominalización (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · ca nominalització (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · fr substantivation (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · mn нэршил (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · sq emërzim (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · fi nominaalistus (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · el ουσιαστικοποίηση (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · tr adlaştırma (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · pt substantivação (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · ca substantivació (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · gl substantivación (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun) · pt nominalização (use of a verb or an adjective as a noun)