English verb-particle compound nouns, composed of a verb and a particle, abound in English. This study first proposes that the embodiment of language and the economy of cognition are the emerging motivation of such nouns and then elucidates from a diachronic and a cognitive perspective the mechanism of construal that such nouns follow regarding their form and meaning. The findings are as follows: firstly, in terms of form, these nouns arise from the nominalization of phrasal verbs; the two are in a relation of grammatical metaphor and this process of metaphorization involves a class shift, which in turn results in a rank shift. Secondly, in terms of meaning, the two are metonymic; they express the same propositional meaning but different expressive meanings. Thirdly, in the process of the transformation, different aspects of the event become prominent: from the action itself to the event as a whole, the agent, the patient, the instrument, the site, or even the result of the event.