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In linguistics, 'conversion', also called 'zero derivation', is a kind of word formation; specifically, it is the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form. Conversion is more productive in some languages than in others; in English it is a fairly productive process.
Often a word of one lexical category (part of speech) is converted from a word of another lexical category; for example, the noun ''green'' in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective ''green''. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is ''verbing'', the creation of a verb by a converting a noun or other word.
The boundary between conversion and ''functional shift'' (the extension of an existing word to take on a new syntactic function) is not well-defined.