Blame the tagger

Kennel is a verb?

In the UK WaC corpus, the phrase,  hunt kennels is tagged as N + V, which serendipitously turned up in the wordsketch of “hunt”. Kennel is tagged as a verb 500 times. The 170 kennels are mostly NNS (plural noun), i.e. wrongly tagged. Ditto the 96 kennelling, which are mostly gerunds, sometimes present participles as adjectives.  However, the 94 kennelled are mostly verbs, and mostly passive but sometimes simple past where they have a normal animate subject: someone kennelled their type of dog, pack.

This hunt set out to discover if kennel is used as a verb, and to defer to Rosemary Moon’s comment, you can verb any noun. Wordnet no doubt has a list of house nouns, many of which are as likely to be as verbable as kennel. To house is hardly an uncommon verb.

The odd thing about hunt kennels being tagged as N + V is that kennelling is not performed by inanimate subjects. And the tagger should take this into consideration. The unimaginative morphology of English that sees 's' as the third person singular ending and the third person plural ending is clearly at the heart of this problem. 

The tagger is also an inanimate non-sentient robot, so the buck stops with the programmers of taggers who are both animate and sentient beings.