When we thread a bead, what are we doing to the thread?
Sure, you can both bead a thread and vice versa, as the first sense of the verb bead given by the OED is:
- trans. To furnish, adorn, or work with beads.
And it gives citations sush as these:
- 1822 Beddoes Bride’s Trag. ɪɪɪ. iv, ― Drops enough to bead a thousand such [necklaces.]
- 1856 Miss Yonge Daisy Ch. ɪ. xxii. (1879) 228 ― Morning dew, which beaded the webs of the spiders.
You are threading the string through the bead. Definition 2a (2) from Merriam-Webster.
to pass (as a tape, line, or film) into or through something (threaded a fresh roll of film into the camera).
This is the Provisional sense of verbing a noun.
If the noun "X" is a member of a large class of physical things, the Zero-derived Provisional transitive verb to X means 'to provide with X'. Exemplorum gratia:
- to seed a lawn
- to water a horse
- to oil machinery
- to roof a house
(There is also an opposite Privative sense, which means 'to deprive of or remove X', ee.g.
- to seed a pepper
- to milk a cow
- to peel an orange
- to skin a cat )
Since in the Provisional sense the direct object is provided with the verb's object noun, then whether one uses thread the beads or bead the thread depends on whether it is the beads or the thread that is viewed as the main "possessor" noun. Similar remarks apply to the verb string, which is probably more common in construction with bead.