@catseye3 said in Dubious Word of the Day:
@aqua-letifer I wonder, is it a legitimate verb or was it popularly turned into a verb from being solely a noun?
In one of the Nero Wolfe books, his factotum Archie related how Wolfe so profoundly disapproved of using 'contact' as a verb that any client who committed that sin got $2,000 added to his bill.
That's how combatted strikes me -- okay as a noun and as a verb, but as a past tense verb it just looks weird.
The French, Old French, and Latin roots were all verbs. I think it looks weird because today it's a rarer usage.