Anthimeria
Quick answer: Anthimeria is using one part of speech as another, like turning a noun into a verb. See how poets from Shakespeare onward bend grammar for energy.
Anthimeria is the rhetorical device of using one part of speech as another, most often pressing a noun into service as a verb. When someone says they will 'pencil you in', 'table a motion', or 'adult all weekend', that is anthimeria at work. The term comes from Greek, meaning roughly 'one part for another', and rhetoricians class it as a figure of functional shift. English invites the trick because its words carry few grammatical endings, so a noun can walk into a verb's job without changing clothes.
Poets love anthimeria because it makes language feel freshly minted. A converted word arrives carrying its old life: verb a noun and the action stays thick with the thing. It compresses, surprises, and often does the work of a whole simile in one syllable.
How It Works
The device runs on transferred properties. Take a concrete noun with strong associations and force it to behave as a verb, and the associations come along as flavour. Position matters: the shifted word should sit where grammar makes its new role unmistakable, otherwise readers stumble rather than spark.
Some invented examples show the range. Noun to verb: 'The fog wolfed the harbour before noon.' Adjective to noun: 'She wore her expensive like armour.' Noun to adjective: 'his cathedral silence'. In each case the reader performs a tiny act of translation, and that flicker of effort is the pleasure.
Where You Will See It
Shakespeare is the patron saint; scholars have counted hundreds of functional shifts in his work, characters who 'uncle' and 'dog' and 'out-Herod' their way through the plays, and Cleopatra fearing some actor will 'boy' her greatness on stage. Gerard Manley Hopkins shifts word classes constantly in his sound-packed lines. Among moderns, E. E. Cummings made anthimeria a signature, building famous poems around phrases where 'anyone' and 'noone' behave as names and adjectives act like nouns. Advertising and slang keep the device in daily circulation, which is why it still reads as lively rather than antique.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Ration it. One inspired shift per poem reads as brilliance; four read as a tic. Choose source words whose physical character survives the move, animals, tools, weather, and body parts convert well because their behaviour is vivid. Test the line on a reader: if they pause with pleasure, keep it; if they reread in confusion, the grammar around the shift needs firming. Contest judges scoring language, at Writory as elsewhere, tend to remember exactly one word from a poem, and a well-turned anthimeria is often that word.
What poets can take from this
- Limit yourself to one or two shifts per poem.
- Convert concrete, behaviour-rich nouns; abstractions shift poorly.
- Make the surrounding grammar unambiguous so the new role is instant.
- Read the line aloud; a good shift snaps, a bad one snags.
- Avoid shifts that business jargon has already worn out, like 'leverage' and 'impact'.
Try it yourself
List ten concrete nouns from your kitchen or street, then write a poem in which exactly one of them appears as a verb at a turning point. Let the rest of the poem stay grammatically plain so the shift carries full voltage.
Questions
What is the difference between anthimeria and neologism?
A neologism is a newly invented word; anthimeria reuses an existing word in a new grammatical role. 'Chortle' was a neologism when Carroll coined it, while 'to google' began as anthimeria, a proper noun acting as a verb.
Is verbing nouns bad style?
Not inherently. Style guides object to tired business verbings, but poets from Shakespeare to Cummings have used functional shift as a source of energy. The test is freshness: a shift no one has seen delights, a worn one deadens.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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