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In linguistics, 'agent noun' (or 'nomen agentis') is a word that is derived from another word denoting an action (''A'') and that has the meaning 'entity that does A'. ''Agent noun'' (or ''nomen agentis'') is also the name of this derivational meaning (also called a ''derivateme'').
An English example: the noun ''driver'', derived from the verb ''to drive''. ''-er'' is the common English agent noun-forming suffix.
Usually, ''derived'' in the above definition has the strict sense attached to it in morphology, i.e., the derivation takes as an input a lexeme and produces a new lexeme. However, the classification of morphemes into derivational morphemes and inflectional ones is not generally a theoretical question that is straightforward, and different authors can make different decisions as to the general theoretical principles of the classification as well as to the actual classification of morphemes presented in a grammar of some language (for example, of the agent noun-forming morpheme).

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See also

★ Nominalization