Gerund

Gerund (/ˈdʒɛrənd/ or /ˈdʒɛrʌnd/; abbreviated GER) is a term for a verb form that functions as a noun. Although similar in usage to verbal noun, the two terms are not synonymous as gerund retains properties of a verb while verbal noun does not; in English this is most evident in the fact that a gerund can be modified by an adverb and can take a direct object. The term "-ing form" is often used in English to refer to gerund specifically. Traditional grammar made a distinction within -ing forms between present participles and gerunds, a distinction that is not observed in such modern linguistically-informed grammars as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

The Latin gerund is used in a restricted set of syntactic contexts, to denote the sense of the verb in isolation after certain prepositions, and in certain uses of the genitive, dative and ablative cases. It is very rarely combined with dependent sentence elements such as Object. To express such concepts, the construction with the adjectival gerundive is preferred. By contrast, the term gerund has been used in the grammatical description of other languages to label verbal nouns used in a wide range of syntactic contexts and with a full range of clause elements.

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