Compound nouns formed from verb+preposition? (2025)

I believe I have noticed a pattern, but I don't know what to call it. I'll start with examples:

pick up, pickup I'll pick up my girlfriend at the pickup location
log in, login Enter your login information to log in
hide out, hideout I'm going to hide out at my treehouse hideout
work out, workout I went to work out, and had a 2-hour workout

The format is verb+preposition being combined to form a noun. Am I correct that this a rule? Is there a grammatical term for this?

Hello DonTomás,

are you asking about compound nouns? If so, they can be composed of other words as well (not only of verbs and prepositions - as shown in the linked wikipedia article).

DonTomás said:

That is, "checkout my new hat" is grammatically wrong?

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Yes, but don't be surprised if you do see it.

DonTomás said:

Can we conclude that it is incorrect to use a compound noun like a verb?

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For the ones that are composed of a verb and a preposition, yes, but not all compound nouns have the same structure. Most won't work as verbs, but a few that have been around a long time have become commonly used verbs, like shoehorn or warehouse.

DonTomás said:

Can we conclude that it is incorrect to use a compound noun like a verb? That is, "checkout my new hat" is grammatically wrong?

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No, that would be an unjustified extrapolation of the pattern you've seen.

Language changes over time. Sometimes verbs or verb phrases get fused into new words.

The article Compound Verbs identifies a few in English:

stirfry, kickstart and forcefeed

I'm not certain for these words in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had an evolution that included a hyphenated usage:

stir fry --> stir-fry --> stirfry (* just a hunch *)

dharasty said:

I'm not certain for these words in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had an evolution that included a hyphenated usage:

stir fry --> stir-fry --> stirfry (* just a hunch *)

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1959 C. B. T. Lee Chinese Cooking for Amer. Kitchens 82 Add all ingredients except egg roll skin and beaten egg. Stir-fry for 3 minutes.

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Edit: My apologies. The quotation is the earliest citation for "stir-fry" in the OED.

DonTomás said:

I believe I have noticed a pattern, but I don't know what to call it. I'll start with examples:

pick up, pickup I'll pick up my girlfriend at the pickup location
log in, login Enter your login information to log in
hide out, hideout I'm going to hide out at my treehouse hideout
work out, workout I went to work out, and had a 2-hour workout

The format is verb+preposition being combined to form a noun. Am I correct that this a rule? Is there a grammatical term for this?

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It is most certainly a rule. It's just a rule with no name that I'm aware of. There seems to be some doubt in other comments here that such a rule exist, though. It is, however, a solid rule.

Whenever a noun is formed by the unhyphenated joining of a verb and a preposition as in all of your examples, the verb form is constituted of the separated words and the noun is compound with no hyphen. You have shown this clearly. The logic is simple. You can log me in, but you can't login me. Note that if the verb form was not separate, you could never say, "Log me in. Pick me up. Work me out," etc. The same for the rest.

One of the most common, and for me, confusing errors on the Internet is using the compound noun as if it were a verb. It drives me nuts, because I come from an era that strongly conditioned my mind to pronounce them differently, as we still do while so many seem to fail to associate this with the written forms. The pronunciation is different because of the accented syllable. The noun is "a LOGin" and the verb is as in "I want to log IN." When I see the wrong written form, my brain reflexively reads it wrong and I have go back in a sense to correct it mentally. It drives me nuts. (Now you understand how I got this way. )

It is not a rule. There are no rules in English because there are no rule-makers, only people who speak the language. It is a common pattern that is generally true.

However, the language is not fixed, and "login" provides a good example. The verb "to log in" predates computers by many years and referred to making an entry in a log - a record book - when coming on duty. Computing took the verb and needed a noun, originally a "log-in", which followed a common path to become a "login". The verb has now mutated to have two forms. The transitive form which separates the preposition from the verb - "He logged me in" and the intransitive form which appears in both separate and combined forms "I will log in" and "I will login". The second isn't wrong; it's the language evolving.

Hello, rpwendell -- welcome to the forum!

rpwendell said:

The noun is "a LOGin" and the verb is as in "I want to log IN."

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I agree that the stress is "log in", in this short example sentence. But in longer sentences, I commonly hear "log in" pronounced with equal stress, or even the stress on "log". There is nothing incorrect about that, since the stress choice depends on the sentence structure. So the noun "login" and verb phrase "log in" often sound the same.

I'm a retired software engineer, and I always write "log in" for the verb, but "login" used as an (intransitive) verb doesn't bother me.

Note that "login" is also an adjective. For example "What is your login name? What is your login password?"

What about "log on"? That is just as common as "log in", and "logon" is a noun and adjective too. Do people use "logon" as a verb too?