Pro-verb

"Pro-verb" in a Sentence (2 examples)

“They herd cattle, and raise corn, just as we used to do”; i.e., to herd cattle and raise corn. Do is sometimes thus used as a sort of pro-verb to represent an active verb or a phrase.

The pro-verb do is like a pronoun; just as a pronoun replaces the entire NP, the pro-verb replaces an entire VP.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.