I was helping a friend construct her resume on Sunday. She is Chinese, and it's been difficult for her to get our language just right. One puzzle for her is how to use the term "data entry". She has experience entering data into a computer, but to just call it a "data entry" job or to say that one of her tasks was "data entry" sounds odd to her. As we discussed it, the usage was odd to me, too.

Is it a noun or a verb?

"data entry"

For me, data entry is a noun, or, more technically a nominal compound consisting of two nouns, kind of like [i]truckdriver. The first noun qualifies the second one. The verb for me would be to enter data. Though, the back formation, babysit has become acceptable, at least in US English, other possibilities, like truckdrive and data enter have not. NB, don't be fooled by the lack of spaces, hyphens, or nothing in any of these compounds. But, then, bucketkicker is not possible, in my dialect, for the departed. If data entry is a verb, how would you conjugate it? Data entry job is simply another nominal compound, made up of the compound data entry and the noun job. One of the great things about Chinese is their almost complete lack of morphology. Most words, you look up in a dictionary can be nouns, adjectives, or verbs, without any change of form.

There's always "data entry technician", "data storage manager", or "computer manuscript interface manager".

So if you say "data-entry technician," wouldn't "data-entry" be an adjective then?

Not really. They'd both be compound nouns, what zm calls "nominal compounds" above.

It's like "car door" or "flower pot". "Car" and "flower" aren't adjectives describing "door" and "pot" they are elements of the compound nouns.

quote:

It's like "car door" or "flower pot". "Car" and "flower" aren't adjectives describing "door" and "pot" they are elements of the compound nouns.

Mine you, if it were a "flowery pot" then that would be different.