"Verbing a word": the practice of changing an ordinary word into an action word. Can be especially confusing to English teachers.

One of my favorite examples comes from my second year lab. I asked someone to mass something for me. Strange thing is, he understood completely. I needed its mass, not its weight (weight being a measure of the force of gravity upon an object).

You can verb practically any word. I have a friend that contests that you cannot verb the word "verb", but I have verbed it many, many times in this node alone. Some difficult-to-verb words: toilet, shirt, Coca-cola, etc. There are some very fun words to verb as well - mass being one, CD, notebook, etc. There are many others.

Verbing words is common practice in the hard sciences, where we aren't forced to speak REAL English very often, because it's just not adequate in any case.