Simply put, a gerund is a noun formed by taking a base verb and adding the suffix* –ing.  Gerunds are very easy to make: you just add –ing to the base form of a verb, for example: give + ing = giving.  It is important to remember though that gerunds aren’t verbs; they are nouns.  The tricky thing about gerunds in English is that they look exactly like verbs in the present participle tense (Note: present participle is a verb tense used to indicate that an action is incomplete).

Let’s look at what gerunds look like in a few sentences so you can see how they act like nouns and not verbs.  To do this first you need to know how to find a noun in a sentence (see my previous post on Parts of Speech in English – Nouns).

Take a look at these sentences:

The pool is fun.
English is difficult.
That is a new dance.

The nouns in these sentences, which are in bold, are: ‘the pool’, ‘English’, and ‘a (new**) dance.’

If I take these nouns out of these sentences, I can replace them with any noun (any noun that will also make sense in the situation), including a gerund, that I want .

Here are the same base sentences that now include gerunds:

Swimming is fun.
Speaking is difficult.
That is dancing!

Now, in these sentences, ‘swimming,’ ‘speaking,’ and ‘dancing’ are the nouns, even though they might look like verbs because they end in -ing.  In these sentences the gerunds are occupying the place in the sentence where the noun goes, which is one way you know these words are noun.  If you look at these sentences you can see that gerunds can be both the subject of a sentence, for example: ‘Swimming is fun.’ or the direct object of a sentence, for example: ‘I like swimming.’  In either case the gerund is a noun not a verb.

Of course, our discussion of gerunds can go more in depth from here, as gerunds have qualities of nouns and verbs and sometimes a gerund can behave as a verb within a clause (it may be modified by an adverb or have an object of its own) in this case the clause as a whole acts as a noun phrase within the larger sentence.  This is going a little beyond what I want to cover here though, which is: what is a gerund and how can you identify one?  The answers to these questions are:  a gerund is a kind of noun, it is a word ending in –ing that occupies the ‘noun place’ in a sentence.

* suffix = a word ending
** The word “new” in this sentence is an adjective describing the noun ‘dance.’