the term for a noun that is the act of doing a verb

What is it called when you have a noun that is either the act of doing a verb or the result of having done the verb, and is not a gerund, and usually has a suffix like "al" or "tion"?

Examples:

• remove -> removal


• add -> addition

And by extension, my actual problem is to find this form for the word "edit." Something that is not a gerund and means the equivalent of the pseudo-word "editation".

Answer

I don’t believe there is a single, unambiguous word for this precise concept.

The class of deverbal nouns comes very close:

Deverbal nouns are nouns that are derived from verbs or verb phrases, but that behave grammatically purely as nouns, not as verbs. They are distinct from verbal noun types such as gerunds and infinitives, which behave like verbs within their phrase (although that verb phrase is then used as a noun phrase within the larger sentence).

But as you can see, a deverbal noun does not necessarily mean either the act of doing the noun or the result of it. They nearly always do, but they may have other meanings as well (e.g., from exist we have the deverbal noun existence, which is neither the act nor the result of existing, but more like the state in which existing occurs).

Deverbal nouns are by some considered a subcategory of verbal nouns. The Wikipedia article treats them as such, by which definition the best answer to your question is probably verbal noun.

Unfortunately not everyone would agree with that definition. In my experience, the more common definition of a verbal noun in the context of English is any noun form that corresponds to a verb, refers to the action (or result) or a verb and retains some verbal traits, like the ability to take objects for example. In English, that means infinitives (‘to err is human’) and gerunds (‘dreaming is easy’), but not deverbal nouns, which are pure nouns and do not retain any verbal properties. I would classify both the examples you give as deverbal nouns, but not verbal nouns; others would classify them as both.

There is also the question of whether you actually want to include forms like infinitives and gerunds – the examples you give are both derived nouns, whereas infinitives and gerunds are inflected forms; and since you say you’re really looking for a word of this type for edit that isn’t a gerund, I’m guessing you want to exclude the inflected forms.

So depending on your theoretical standpoint and whether you want to refer to both inflected and derived forms, I think your best choice would be either verbal noun, deverbal noun, or both. Since you appear to not want to include gerunds, I will suggest deverbal noun as your best bet, even though a deverbal noun doesn’t necessarily have to refer to the act or result of the base verb.