nominalization

English

Examples
proliferate → proliferation pompous → pomposity corrupt → corruption

Alternative forms

• nominalisation (Non-Oxford British spelling)

Etymology

From nominal +‎ -ization or nominalize +‎ -ation.

Noun

nominalization (countable and uncountable, plural nominalizations) (American spelling, Oxford British English)

1. (linguistics, countable) A noun derived from an adjective, verb, etc., often (in english) by adding a suffix such as -ity, -tion or -ism.
   • 2012 July 23, Helen Sword, “Zombie Nouns”, in NY Times‎^[1]:

     Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract.

2. (linguistics, uncountable) The act or process of nominalizing; the use of such a noun.
   • 2014 February 9, Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 722:

     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) […]

   • 2017 April, William Alan Lingle, Nominalizations, Agentless Passives, and Social Actor Mystification: Newspaper Editorials on the Greek Financial Crisis:

     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.

   • 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 is a common feature of a more scientific style of writing and is used as an additional measure for syntactic complexity.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:nominalization.

Synonyms

• substantivisation
• substantivation (uncommon)
• nounification

Derived terms

• agentive nominalization / agentive nominalisation
• nominalizer

Translations

use of a verb or an adjective as a noun

• Arabic: please add this translation if you can
• Armenian: please add this translation if you can
• Azerbaijani: isimləşmə
• Catalan: nominalització f, substantivació f
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 名詞化 / 名词化 (zh) (míngcíhuà)

• Danish: please add this translation if you can
• Dutch: substantivering (nl) f, nominalisatie f
• Esperanto: substantivigo
• Estonian: please add this translation if you can
• French: substantivation (fr) f, nominalisation (fr) f
• Galician: substantivación (gl) f, nominalización f
• Georgian: please add this translation if you can
• German: Nominalisierung (de) f, Substantivierung (de) f, Hauptwortbildung f
• Greek: ουσιαστικοποίηση (el) f (ousiastikopoíisi)
• Indonesian: nominalisasi (id)
• Italian: sostantivazione (it), nominalizzazione f
• Japanese: 名詞化 (ja) (めいしか, meishika)
• Khmer: please add this translation if you can
• Korean: 명사화 (myeongsahwa)
• Lao: please add this translation if you can
• Latvian: nominalizācija f
• Lithuanian: please add this translation if you can
• Mongolian:

  Cyrillic: нэршихүй (neršixüj), нэршил (mn) (neršil)

  Mongolian: ᠨᠡᠷᠡᠰᠢᠬᠦᠢ (neresiküi), ᠨᠡᠷᠡᠰᠢᠯ (neresil)

• Persian: please add this translation if you can
• Polish: nominalizacja f, substantywizacja (pl) f
• Portuguese: substantivação (pt) f, nominalização f
• Romanian: please add this translation if you can
• Russian: субстантива́ция (ru) f (substantivácija), номинализа́ция (ru) f (nominalizácija)
• Spanish: substantivación (es) f, nominalización (es) f
• Thai: please add this translation if you can
• Turkish: adlaştırma (tr)
• Vietnamese: danh từ hoá

Further reading

• “nominalization”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• nominalization, substantivization, substantivisation, substantivation at the Google Books Ngram Viewer.