"Rollbacked" or "rolled back" the edit? And what about "double-click"?

Question

The noun (and verb) rollback on Stack Exchange means to undo or reverse an edit. I'm not sure if there is a difference between the two, but that's how I understand it.

Recently, I posted the past participle rollbacked, in a comment, and after a bit I looked at it and realised I should have written rolled back.

The problem is that rollback is spelt as one word, so adding the suffix -ed was an automatic gesture. And if I think about it, backed is an adjective, and back is also a verb. Here's another example, double-click, is the past tense doubled-click or double-clicked?

Was I so wrong to write rollbacked?

Why should it have been rolled back (two words)?

Are there cases of compound nouns (and verbs) where either the first noun/verb or the second can be placed in the simple past tense with no changing in meaning? I can't think of any on the top of my head.

Answer 1

Tenses always apply to verbs, so to see where to apply it, you need to figure out which part of the compound (or hyphenated) word is the verb.

"Rollback" is a compound word, consisting of the verb "roll" and the preposition "back", as Peter indicated. As such, "rolling" is what you are doing, and "back" indicates where you're rolling (as opposed to rolling forward).

"Rollbacked" would imply that "back" is the verb, as in "to support". Unless you're supporting the edit with a cinnamon roll or used said cinnamon roll to move it back, this is not correct.

A converse compound word would be "backup" -- here, "back" is the verb and "up" is the preposition (see the etymology of 'backup' in its non-compounded form). You haven't "backupped" the files, you've "backed up" the files.

With regards to double-click, "double" is the adverb that modifies the verb "click", so "double-clicked" is the correct form. I can see this possibly being confusing because it could be seen that you're "doubling" the click (or past tense, you "doubled" the click); however, when you tell someone to single click, you just say "click the button", and thus it becomes more obvious that click is the verb here.

Answer 2

In your examples

rollback

is a compound word consisting of the verb to roll and the preposition back.

It is similar to

turnoff

which is composed of to turn and off.

The past tenses are

rolled back
turned off

You may be confusing the nouns with the similar sounding verb phrases

Q: Did you roll back the rollback of the databases?
A: Yes, we rolled back the databases to before the update.

Q: I took the wrong turnoff and got lost.
I turned off the wrong exit.

Walmart is rolling back their prices to be the same as several years ago.

In the case of

double-click

the implied verb is "click", and the past tense is

double-clicked

She double-clicked on the "send" button after proofreading her email.

Answer 3

According to https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rollback, "rollback" can be either a noun or a verb, and "rollbacked" is presumably the correct past tense of that verb.

But in BrE, I would have written "rolled back" in the OP's example. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/roll gives "Roll something back" as a phrasal verb. By analogy with a word like "rollnecked", "rollbacked" seems like the adjective derived from the noun "rollback", not the past tense a the verb. (But https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/roll-neck gives "roll-neck" with a hyphen...)

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/double-click says "double-click" is a verb, and its past tense would logically be "double-clicked" - though the reference only gives examples in the present tense. A "doubled-click" seems like a noun (i.e. a particular sort of click), but I don't think the word is actually used.

For similar computing terms like "shift-click", "Alt-click", forms like "shifted-click" and "Alted-click" would be very strange, compared with the usual "shift-clicked" or "Alt-clicked".