§237. Names of Actions and Abstract Nouns
Names of Actions are confused, through their terminations, with real abstract nouns (names of qualities), and with concrete nouns denoting means and instrument.
They are also used to express the concrete result of an action (as often in English).
Thus legiō is literally the act of collecting, but comes to mean legion (the body of soldiers collected); cf. levy in English.
J. H. Allen and J. B. Greenough, New Latin Grammar (Boston: Ginn, 1903). Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.