Use of "suspicion" as verb [closed]

My coworker says things like

I suspicion that it happened the other day when nobody was here.

I would say

I suspect it happened

or

I have a suspicion that it happened.

What my coworker says sounds wrong to me. Is it common usage anywhere?


I’ve never heard or read it used as such, but the OED has an entry for ‘suspicion’ as a verb, with supporting citations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Those cited include authors as diverse as John Buchan, C S Forester, Samuel Beckett, Rudyard Kipling and Carson McCullers.


Of course I suspicion sounds wrong. If we take as read that suspicion is a verb meaning suspect, then I suspicion is ungrammatical because suspect requires an object, so suspicion requires an object too.

You cannot just suspect, you must suspect something, much like you can't just hate, you must hate something. So you must suspicion something.

That said, despite suspicion being cited as a verb, I have not heard it and I would not use it as such.


I don't recall ever hearing "suspicion" used as a verb. The conventional verb form is "suspect". I see thefreedictionary.com lists it as a "nonstandard verb". But that's a very rare usage.