Verbology

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The examination of verb forms and their grammatical roles
2. The field that investigates the usage, structure, and meaning of verbs in language
3. The analysis of verb forms and their syntactic roles within sentences

Etymology: The study of verbs is named with two parts that both mean "word." The first, "verb," comes from Latin "verbum," meaning word. The second, "-ology," comes from Greek "-logia," from "logos," which also meant word, speech, or reasoning. So the name is in effect "word-word study," which is a neat irony for a field devoted to just one kind of word. The "-ology" ending was widely used to build names for fields of study, so "verbology" follows a common pattern. It is a transparent formation, built on the English "verb" rather than inherited from classical Latin or Greek as a term of its own.