This chapter aims to provide a combined lexicographic and corpus-based distributional semantic analysis of the competing nominalisations V-age and V-ing. The starting point is a diachronic study of V-age nominals using the historical Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in order to determine the diachronic evolution of this morphological pattern. A conceptual analysis of the dictionary definitions provides a semantic typology of V-age nouns, which we then compare with the considerably more frequent V-ing nouns. Following the lexicographic treatment which provides some competing pairs of V-age and V-ing nominals, such as stickage and sticking, we test the distributional semantic behaviour of a small sample V-age and V-ing pairs in order to identify their specificities in both diachronic and synchronic corpora. The continued co-existence of the low-frequency V-age nouns with high-frequency V-ing nouns remains of interest, showing that morphological productivity and life cycles of patterns are not simply a matter of competition, but rather one of lexical variety. The conclusions of this small-scale study confirm that the competition within the semantic space of nominalisations requires a fine-grained register specific corpus-based study which will provide a more accurate visualization of the ‘ecology’ of these nominalisations to quote Rochelle Lieber.