The purpose of the present study is to revisit the semantics and usage of verbderived nominals to which the derivational morpheme -tion is suffixed (e.g. production; referred to as “TN,” henceforth) and to propose an alternative descriptive model that contains the information to be explicitly provided in educational settings. This paper is organized as follows: the section following the introduction concerns how the suffix -tion and TNs are described in the dictionary and reference books on grammar and usage, and it is argued that much of the necessary information is presented, but not in such a way as to be fully explicit to language learners. In section 3, I discuss whether the descriptions concerned reflect the realistic functions and applications of the language well, drawing on the examples culled from the BNC and others constructed for analysis. It is then suggested that the descriptions of the relationship between the semantics and usage of TNs is far from satisfactory for language learners to properly understand and use this nominal category. Finally, I propose a new, though tentative, description that can be explicitly presented in any language learning circumstance, in order to bridge the gap between what is described and what actually happens in language.