About gerunds

A reader asked, "What are gerunds?"

Gerunds are nouns that are formed from verbs by adding -ing. (The gerund of a verb looks exactly like the present participle. As with present participles, sometimes you have to double a consonant or delete a final -e before adding -ing.)

Using a gerund is a good way to talk about the activity or process of doing the verb, usually for a period of time. For example, consider the verb travel, which means "to go on a trip or journey." Add -ing, and you have the gerund traveling, and it can be used to talk about the activity of traveling, as in this example:

We love traveling by train.

Because it's a noun, a gerund can be the subject or object of a verb, or the object of a preposition, as shown in these examples:

• Skiing is my favorite sport. (Skiing is the subject of is.)
• Russ prefers snowboarding. (Snowboarding is the object of prefers.)
• New skiers are often afraid of falling. (Falling is the object of the preposition of.)

One note of caution: There are a number of verbs that take objects, but cannot take gerunds as objects, such as:

• want
• ask
• promise

A good way to find out if a verb can take a gerund as an object is to look the verb up in Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary. If you don't see any example sentences with gerund objects, you'll know it's probably not a good idea. There will be more to come about this in a later post.