An "increase of" vs. "increasing of"?

Question

Before I always though that, because word "increase" is a noun, I should use it. But just recently I've seen someone using "increasing of" too. And at first, I thought that it isn't correct, but then I discovered that "increasing" is a gerund. So which way is right?

Anton · Answer

Increase is also a verb

Increase = to (make something) become larger in amount or size:
”Incidents of armed robbery have increased over the last few years.”
”Gradually increase the temperature to boiling point.”
[Cambridge dictionary[(https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/increase)

An increase (noun) may be effected by increasing something, as in the Cambridge example of temperature. “The increase in temperature resulted from increasing the heating.”
The gerundial noun increasing may also be sometimes used. Compare “The increase of taxes was 50%” and “the increasing of taxes was a controversial process.)

BoldBen · Answer

Many, if not most, verbs in English have an associated noun which is identical to the infinitive (but without the 'to').
In some cases the noun is derived from the verb. For example a 'drive' was originally either a road to a big house up which carriages were driven or was an occasion when a large number of animals were driven (on foot) from a remote farming area to a city for sale as meat. Both of these nouns derive from the verb 'to drive'.
Other verbs derive from pre-existing nouns. For instance a 'lever' is a long rigid object used to lift something heavy by pressing it against a fulcrum. This gave rise to the verb "to lever" which means to raise a heavy object using a lever.
As it is easy to make a regular verb from a noun in English (you add 'to' to make the full infinitive and add standard endings and auxiliary verbs to make the tenses) this happens a lot, particularly in informal language. For example the noun 'clock' has three informal noun forms (at least): there is "to clock someone" which means to spot and recognise them as in "I clocked the thief coming into the shop"; there is "to clock the speed of something" which means to detect and record its speed as in "The traffic officer clocked the Porche doing 60 in a 30 area" and there is also "to clock a speedometer" which means to turn it back so that the vehicle seems to  have done fewer miles than it actually has done (although this is just about impossible with digital speedometers so will probably disappear soon).-
I have no idea whether the verb 'to increase' came before the noun 'increase' because they are both really old words. I suspect that the verb came first but it would be impossible to prove and it really doesn't matter

An "increase of" vs. "increasing of"?

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