My favorite NY-Times columnist Maureen Dowd who consistently supplies me the material for posting questions in EL&U site begins today’s (December 8) article titled “A Lost Civilization” with the line:
“My college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together.
The only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of
corn.”
All of Cambridge, Oxford, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries register “grocery” as a noun meaning “grocery store (Cambridge),” “grocer’s shop or business (Oxford)” and “(1) grocer’s store, (2) groceries sold by a grocer.” However, none of them lists “grocery” as a verb.
I know a noun are often used as verbs like 'bicycle a trip,' 'pen a letter,' and 'market a new product,' but is “grocery” widely used as a verb meaning ‘to visit a grocery store,’ or simply ‘shop around’?
Is the use of "X-shop" as a verb 'trendy' and universal?
Can I say “I barber shop once a month," "He golf shopped to buy a new club," "She used to barger shops for a lunch," "I sport shopped to buy a new ski wear," "I computer shopped a new i-phone model yesterday," "I book shopped for a Jeffery Archer's paperback yesterday," and "I pawn shopped to loan $300," without being frowned?
Best Answer
It depends what you mean by ‘common’. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 10 records for to grocery shop, and the Oxford English Dictionary has this citation 1979 citation from the Arizona Daily Star:
There are no records for the string in the British National Corpus.
If you say any of the sentences in your final paragraph, it is by no means certain that you will be understood. Barber shop, as a verb, sounds as if you’re shopping for barbers, an unlikely activity. The verb grocery shop is established, to the limited extent that it is, because shopping for groceries is fairly common. Language exists to meet a need, and there would seem to be even less of a need for a special verb for shopping for golf clubs than there is for shopping for groceries.