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by quietbritishjim 2039 days ago
It's an annoying but very common habit, especially but not exclusively in US English.

You might be more familiar with the habit of referring to "an invite" instead of "an invitation" or "a quote" instead of "a quotation", which fit the same pattern of "compute" instead of "computation". There's even "the big reveal" instead of "the big revelation" - using "revelation" would likely confuse many people, who would assume it was exclusively religious.

1 comments

I'm more familiar with the practice of verbing nouns and adjectives, which is very common (a famous Calvin&Hobbes strip ends with the punchline "verbing weirds language"). The opposite practice of nouning verbs has a very different feeling; I'd say it's almost pedantic, or very dry; not as lively as verbing, for sure.
I think it’s just short for computation rather than being ‘nouning’.