Can we use "depot" as an adjective? [closed]

Can we use depot in this form: depotted books or depot books? (I’m not sure about the past participle of this word.)

Or should it be used only as a “place” where books are supposed to be stored, a depot of books?

Solution 1:

Remember that depot rhymes not with Camelot nor with pipit, but with sheepo. It ends with a vowel, not a consonant, so attempting to apply verbal inflections to the noun would result in spellings that would confuse people.

Only if you had first potted your book could you then consider depotting it. And while pot as a verb can have other meanings, most people would think of plants when potting things. A depotted plant would therefore be an unpotted plant, an uprooted one. I don’t know how you uproot books, though, so I rather doubt your readers would, either.

To answer your question’s title in the most direct way possible, absolutely not: depot is never an adjective. You’ll never have a very depot book, and one book cannot be any more depot than another can be. Therefore you may not use depot as an adjective.

You can, however, use depot as a noun. One sense given by the OED is:

Applied to a portion of a regiment which remains at home when the rest are on foreign service.

They observe that this sense lends itself to the formation of compound nouns.

Citations include:

• 1853 J. H. Stocqueler Mil. Encycl. 82/2
  Regiments embarking for India usually leave one company at home, for the purpose of recruiting, which is called the depôt company.
• 1881 Chicago Times 16 Apr.
  The company is constructing a depot building..at Leaf River.
• 1884 C. R. Markham in Pall Mall Gaz. 20 Aug. 1/2
  The party should never have been left without a depot ship wintering within accessible distance.

Originally a loanword from the French word dépôt (Old French depost, which it in turn received from the Latin dēpositum), this word is related to the English noun deposit of the same origin. It is used in various senses, but it is never used as an adjective, only as a noun as shown in all three citations provided above.

Order matters here. A book depot is a depot for books. A depot book is a book about depots, or maybe a book from a depot. You will note that no adjectives have been used in the construction of any of these compounds, only nouns alone.

Because of discussion in comments, there’s something that apparently needs to be cleared up.

Attributive noun use does not equate to “using a noun as an adjective”. That’s a facile, deceptive description that quickly falls apart under trivial syntactic tests:

1. Notice how unlike the case with facile, deceptive descriptions, you can’t have a ❌ depot, deceptive book. This is because facile is an adjective but depot is a noun.

2. Just how ❌ depot a book is this depot book you have? It isn’t, because depot is never an adjective. A book can never be ❌ depot.

3. The same reason explains why a pretty depot book is not a book that is ❌ pretty depot. It’s a pretty book that is at or from a depot. Contrast this with a pretty big book, which is a book that’s pretty big, and you will quickly see the difference between an attributive noun and an attributive adjective because big is an adjective but depot is not.

I hope this clearly illustrates why we must say that depot is still functioning as a noun here, not as an adjective. Just because both nouns and adjectives can be used attributively does not mean that doing so changes the one into the other. It does not. They remain separate things. To allege otherwise mistakes parts of speech with grammatical roles. The modifier role is not a part of speech; it is a syntactic function applicable to numerous sorts of syntactic constituents.