811: Participles Feb 26, 2017

Although it is quite common for participles to be mentioned in this blog, they have been little-explained. Quite simply, a participle is a form of a verb (such as 'running' from 'to run') that functions as an adjective (like "the running man"), or as a noun (like "I like running"), and in English is part of compound verb forms, as in "I have been running", with other verbs acting in different ways at the same time. A slew of English words can be identified as coming from Latin participles now because they retain the whole of the Latin participial ending—or the whole of the Latin participle as in the case of 'status'—or just various remnants thereof. Many words that now end with '-ate' come from the Latin ending '-atus' which was common for masculine singular participles, and can at times be quite visually confusing as participles including, 'associate', 'duplicate', and 'isolate' are all nouns, but pronounced differently as verbs.

For a deeper, and funnier evaluation of other participles see this link: French Participles