Is it really OK to use "spend" as a noun?
Lately I keeping encountering "spend" used as a noun. For example, in the brochure for a piece of software: "See your employee spend", meaning the amount of money your employees are spending on expenses. Or in the software itself, a screen with the header: "My Spend".
I know this is in the dictionary, but it still sounds very strange to me. People I ask have never heard it used this way, either, they think it must be a mistake, or a fad. What's wrong with "spending"?
Solution 1:
According to the ODO "spend" as a noun is an informal alternative to "spending":
Spend (informal):
An amount of money paid out:
the average spend at the cafe is £10 a head.
the average spend per child is continuing to rise year-on-year.
According to the Collins Dicionary:
- an amount of money spent, esp regularly, or allocated to be spent
NGRAM shows that spend as a noun has been used since the first decades of the 20th century. Spending appears to be a more common alternative especially from the '70s.
This usage, called nominalization is a matter of debate among linguists as evidenced in the following extract The Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns by Hernry Hitchings:
- I Find that some nominalizations are useful and others are jarring. I can accept that language changes (and has to change) without necessarily cherishing all manifestations of that change. I don’t shudder when I see or hear “This year’s spend is excessive” and “Her book was a good read,” even though I can think of other, perhaps more elegant ways of saying these things.
Solution 2:
Spend as a noun does not yet seem to enjoy general mainstream use. Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) has no entry for spend as a noun—and it appears that Merriam-Webster Online has yet to add an entry for it there. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language didn't offer any information on spend as a noun either, as recently as the fourth edition (2000). But the fifth edition (2011) of AHDEL provides this coverage:
spend ... n. 1. an amount of money spent on something: doubled the spend on computers. 2. The spending of money; expenditure: the management of spend.
From the examples given, it seems clear that both spend (1) and spend (2) could be replaced by spending without changing the underlying meaning in either case. But if spend isn't different in meaning from spending in either of the two senses that AHDEL identifies it as having, why does it exist at all? When a word catches on in some precinct of the business or academic world despite not enabling people to make a fine distinction between one thing (called, say, spend) and another (called, say, spending), the logical explanation is that the new term appeals to them for some reason other than its contribution to greater coherence—its value as a marker of up-to-date jargon fluency, perhaps, or its perceived jauntiness.
In any event, spend as a noun in the two senses spelled out by AHDEL has not yet gained the same level of acceptance as spending, as is evident from this entry in the in-house word list at a business consultancy where I do a lot of freelance editing:
• spending: consumer spending, marketing spending (not “spend”)
I have no doubt that spend as a noun is well entrenched in some areas of the English-speaking world, but it would be a mistake to suppose that it has achieved parity with spending everywhere. A comparable though even less widely recognized term that has emerged from the land of MBAs is ask as a noun, which carries the meaning "question, request, or inquiry." (AHDEL doesn't have an entry for ask as a noun yet.)
Part of word choice is a simple matter of knowing what words are possible—that is, what words are in use (or at least usable), and therefore understandable, in certain English-speaking populations. But another part of word choice involves having a sense of the tenor, reputation, or prestige that a word may have among readers or listeners. It is surely worth noting that spend as a noun has far less currency than spending in the English-speaking world at large.