Converging evidence suggests that languages are shaped by a drive for efficient communication. In particular, it has been shown that languages efficiently compress meanings into words via the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle in domains ranging from visual percepts, such as colors and objects, to non-visual high-level concepts, such as pronouns and number. These domains, however, capture only static elements described by adjectives, nouns, function words, or grammatical markers, leaving open the question of whether the same theory could also apply to verb meanings, which often refer to dynamical aspects of the environment. We address this question by considering locomotion verbs (e.g., walk, run, and jump) across four languages (English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese). We show that locomotion verb meanings across languages are shaped by pressure for efficiency, which resonates with similar findings in other domains and suggests that the IB principle may apply more broadly across the lexicon. Our results also open a new avenue for future work to explore whether semantic categories of actions are rooted in a strictly perceptual representation, or perhaps in motor and functional representations as well.