Since When Did ‘Gift’ Become a Verb?

3 Comments

Heard on a food show on radio while the host was discussing wines to buy (basically an advertisement): “,wines to drink, wines to save, wines to gift.”

I’m not even going to look this one up in the dictionary for fear it may be true: Gift was always a noun, signifying something presented to another person or done for another person’s sake free of charge; give was the verb to indicate such an action. Now I hear people using gift as the verb!

I fear that the English gods over at Oxford University may have already bought into this use of gift, and I don’t wanna know.

What next?

 

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3 Replies to “Since When Did ‘Gift’ Become a Verb?”

  1. Since about 2020 there has been a similar sudden surge in the use (mostly by Americans, I think) of “birth” as a verb. Until a couple of years ago everyone used to say “give birth to”.

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