In English however, verbal noun has most frequently been treated as a synonym for gerund.
Aside from English, the term verbal noun may apply to: Verbal nouns, whether derived from verbs or constituting an infinitive, behave syntactically as grammatical objects or grammatical subject.
[4] They may also be used as count nouns and pluralized but cannot be inflected vis-a-vis a given grammatical person.
Examples of such uses are given below: Infinitives used as verbal nouns generally occur as prefaced by the particle to: Infinitives used as verbal nouns may not be prefaced by the particle to, however, when elided via ellipsis: Verbs also may be nominalized through derivational processes, such as suffixes (as in discovery from the verb discover) or by simple conversion (as with the noun love from the verb love).
When they exist, such deverbal nouns often tend to replace the regularly formed verbal noun (as discovery is usually used rather than discovering, although the latter is still common as a gerund), or else a differentiation in meaning becomes established.