Derivation in which a word comes to be used with a different grammatical function or (sometimes) in a different (though related) sense from the existing one, without the form of the word being altered.
Used by those who explain such change in terms of the addition of a ‘zero morpheme’, i.e. derivation by the addition of nothing. The more usual term for this is conversion: see conversionn. II.11e. Compare earlier zero derivativeadj.
1960
Zero-derivation as a ‘specifically English’ process.
H. Marchand, Categories Present-day English Word-formation v. 295 (heading)
1976
Zero-derivation..must be regarded an extremely productive word-formative process both in English and German, but also in other languages.
Archivum Linguisticumvol. 7 129
2011
Linguists seek to describe and explain a broad range of phenomena, covering territory from acoustic phonetics to zero derivation.
Times Educational Supplement (Nexis) 3 November (Language & Linguistics section) 17
zero derivation typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zero derivation is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zero derivation, n., 1960–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1960
0.0065
1970
0.0072
1980
0.0077
1990
0.0077
2000
0.0091
2010
0.0098
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.