nominalisation

A process for forming nouns from verbs (for example, ‘reaction’ from ‘react’ or ‘departure’ from ‘depart’) or adjectives (for example, ‘length’ from ‘long’, ‘eagerness’ from ‘eager’). Nominalisation is also a process for forming noun groups/phrases from clauses (for example, ‘their destruction of the city’ from ‘they destroyed the city’). Nominalisation is a way of making a text more compact and is often a feature of texts that contain abstract ideas and concepts.