Anthimeria
Anthimeria, also spelled antimeria, is the use of a word as a different part of speech from its usual one, most often a noun used as a verb. The name is Greek, from anti, "instead of", and meros, "part", meaning one part of speech put in place of another. Rhetoricians of the Renaissance listed it among the figures of speech. Linguists describe the same process, when it becomes permanent, as conversion or zero derivation, because the word changes its grammatical class without gaining a suffix.[1]
Examples
Shakespeare used the figure constantly, often for force or contempt. In Richard II the Duke of York rebukes Bolingbroke with "Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle": two nouns become verbs in one line. Cleopatra suspects Octavius of flattering her with "He words me, girls, he words me". Lear remembers the storm, when "the thunder would not peace at my bidding", and in Measure for Measure Lucio says of the deputy who rules Vienna that "Lord Angelo dukes it well".
Everyday English does the same thing so freely that most conversions are no longer noticed: people bottle wine, shoulder a burden, text a friend and email a document. Names of products join them. Merriam-Webster added the verb google to its collegiate dictionary in 2006. English converts words easily because it has lost most of the endings that once marked a word's class, so the position of a word in a sentence is usually enough to show what it is doing.
Some conversions draw objections while they are new. Usage writers of the 1920s and 1930s condemned contact as a verb, which is now unremarkable, and impact as a verb is still criticized in usage guides. In a newspaper strip of 1993 by Bill Watterson, the boy who gives the strip half its title explains to his tiger that he likes to take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs, and concludes: "Verbing weirds language." The sentence contains two examples.
Molecular Reality Corporation
In the essay that introduces Epic Quest Bio, the company's game for running itself, the founder of Molecular Reality Corporation names the figure while explaining one of its character classes. He reaches for "an obscure rhetorical term called 'anthimeria'" and takes his example from The Martian, whose stranded astronaut resolves to science his way off Mars. Then he applies it to the class: "The character class name 'Sciencer' anthimeriates 'science' full circle, from noun to verb and back to noun. In Epic Quest Bio™, Sciencers science."[2] The verb anthimeriate is itself a conversion, made from the noun.
The description of the class ends on a ranking: "Everyone who plays Epic Quest Bio™ is a Player Scientist™, and everyone will science, but Sciencers will science the most sciencely."[2][a] The word was also used as a plain noun: a quest worth 4,000 points asked members to "Work with a sciencer to put together patents (provisional and/or full)". The class was renamed Scientist for the posters of 2026.[3] The verb outlived the name. Emails sent in 2026 under the name of the company's mascot, Keltar, closed with the line "Science the everything,".[3]
The founder has described his attitude to words directly. Of a nickname he gave a published model, he wrote: "They don't call it that in the paper ... but I'm calling it that, because I'm a verbal anarchist."[4][b]