parts of speech - Can a bare infinitive ever modify (“act as an adjective”) a noun?


While browsing a set of lecture slides, I encountered this line:



Catch up/overtake rate



in which overtake rate looks odd to me. As far as I know, a verb may act as an adjective in a couple different ways, e.g., in its gerund (present participle) or past participle forms.


But this line takes the imperative form of the verb (so its ”bare” or to-less infinitive) and uses it as an adjective (or noun?) to modify the noun rate.


So, I'm just wondering whether the lecturer had meant to write overtaking rate here and this was just a mistake, or whether overtake rate is indeed a legit piece of composition in English.


Background


In space dynamics, when two objects are in non-co-orbital circular orbits, the one which is rotating in the lower orbit overtakes the one in the higher orbit because the former’s velocity is higher than that of the latter. The lecturer tries to call this phenomenon its overtake rate.


So the question is, can overtake, which is listed in the dictionary only as a verb, ever be used as a noun and/or adjective the way it appears to be being used here?




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?