Why do we use verbal, verbiage, and verbose to refer to all language and not just verbs?
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We didn’t always have the concept of “verbs”, or a specific word for them. There was just a word for “words”. This made its way into latin as “verbum”, and at some point the romans started using it to also refer to a specific type of word (action words) when it was used in the context of grammar. So the root really means both “word” in general and specifically “verbs”. The word “word” comes from the same root as verbum, but it came to English through germanic languages.
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