What’s a Gerund?

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While not one of the eight traditional parts of speech in the English language, a gerund is a specific type of word applied to English grammar. The word comes from a verb or verb form, but does not act as a verb in a sentence. There are three types of verbs: gerunds, participles and infinitives. Although a gerund is formed from a verb and indicates an action or state of being, it acts as a noun and thus occupies a place in a sentence where normally a noun, such as a subject, direct object or object of a preposition .

Without exception, a gerund always ends in –ing. It can be confused with a participle, which is a verb most often ending in -ing or -ed, but a participle acts like an adjective modifying a noun rather than a noun itself. The following words ending in -ing could be gerunds or participles, depending on how they are used in a sentence.

I swim
Speak
Of travel
Laugh
While gerunds can be difficult to identify in some sentence structures, readers may remember that they are always used as nouns and always end in -ing. The following sentence is an example where the word sleep is a gerund completing the subject: My dog’s favorite pastime is sleeping.

In this example, “sleeping” serves as a compliment to the subject. Identify what the pastime is rather than what the dog is doing. In a different but similar sentence, a noun could substitute for sleep as a subject compliment: My dog’s favorite toy is a ball.

A gerund phrase is a group of words that contain a gerund and also function as a subject, object, or indirect object. The other words modify or complement the expressed action or state of being on which the gerund word is based. When constructing sentences with these verbs, the gerund or phrase rarely, if ever, requires punctuation.

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