In the sentence taken from the text “Over the past few centuries,

In the sentence taken from the text “Over the past few centuries, it has served as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a pronoun”, the pronoun in bold lette...


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Is other a verb?


Like many English words, other possesses great flexibility in meaning and function. Over the past few centuries, it has served as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a pronoun. In recent decades, other has increased its part-of-speech portfolio to include verb use, having acquired the meaning "to treat or consider (a person or a group of people) as alien to oneself or one's group.” Some people find it disconcerting when a word takes on a new part of speech, a process known as functional shift. The phenomenon is quite common, however -- our language contains many thousands of words which are reported to have been formed in this fashion.


https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/other.
In the sentence taken from the text “Over the past few centuries, it has served as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a pronoun”, the pronoun in bold letters refers to the word “other”. Sometimes, though, “it” does not have a referent and serves a grammatical function only, thus being named, for example, “dummy it”. Mark the alternative in which “it” has a referent.

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