what is the proper usage of the word spellbound… as a verb?
It isn’t a verb, it’s an adjective.
So the answer would be: “none.”
“The music was spellbinding.” verb
“She was so entranced by the music, she felt spellbound.” adjective
I’m not sure what the question is.
Just like “to bind”, right?
I spellbind [someone; some object]
You spellbind
He, she, it spellbinds
We spellbind
You (plural) spellbind
They spellbind
Future: I, you, he, she, it will spellbind
Past: I, etc, spellbound
PParticiple: I, etc, have spellbound
Gerund: spellbinding
Adjective: spellbound
Adverb: spellbindingly
“The music was spellbinding.” verb
You might want to rethink your sentence diagram on this one. The verb in this sentence is “was” and “spellbinding” is an adjective.
Actually, if we admitted “spellbind” as a verb, the phrase “was spellbinding” would have been an example of the -ING participle. (E.g., “He was singing.” or “She was binding.” (In answer to the question “What was she doing in the book shop?”.))
Our problem, here, is that the adjective “spellbound” has been created off the verb “to bind” and the OP is now wishing use it in verb form (just as access and contact were originally not verbs that we have converted to verbs in recent years).
I would tend to side with those who would say that spellbound is not yet a recognized verb, in English. I doubt that it would be very easy to find “spellbind” (in any form) used as a verb in current English. However, if some prominent author or lyricist used it in a work, we could easily find it becoming a verb in a short time–and we have no Academy to prevent an ordinary speaker of the language from making a verb out of it, now. (Although the purists among us can still point and laugh at the construction until hoi polloi overwhelm them with the new usage.)
tomndebb , what you say is absolutely true, however, in this particular sentence, spellbinding does not have an object, so I don’t believe it is reasonable to call it a verb. If the sentence had been “The music was spellbinding Susan” then we could call it a verb. As it was written, I believe it is much more reasonable to say that spellbinding describes the nature of the music and so is an adjective.
The OED says that “spell-bind” is a valid transitive verb, and cites a bunch of uses from the 19th century. One could also use it in a sentence like, “His powerful stories of his childhood in Dublin spellbound his audience.”
(Actually, I originally opened this thread thinking that it was a question about the poster punoqllads.)
You might be able to say that; it sounds ungrammatical to me. I would say “The powerful stories of his childhood in Dublin left his audience spellbound.”
Both “spellbound” and “spellbinding” are adjectives, in my opinion. One is formed from a past participle, the other from a gerund. But while the or44iginal verb, “to spellbind”, assuming it was once popular, has disappeared from use. At least in my dialect. As with everything, grammaticality judgments are quite subjective - but I would never say that something spellbound something else, unless I was using the ungrammaticality of the sentence as some sort of rhetorical device.