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In tracking back the nouns-from-adjectives (or, indirectly, verbs) they almost always start as clipped noun phrases. "Documentary" (n.) = "documentary film;" "recall" (n.) "removal of an elected official from office" = "recall election" or "vote." Often there's more than one variation of the noun phrase, which might further encourage the shortening, if further encouragement is wanted. But it's not like the adjective just does a quantum leap into noun-orbit.

RALLY, RE-ALLY: REALLY?

RE- was one of our earliest prefixes to cross from Latin; it was naturalized by early Middle English. Its extended senses are diverse, but the words with it usually are traceable to the basic notions of "again" or "back." RE- even has attained the pantheon of prefixes that can prefix themselves ("I had to re-re-retake my driver's test").

But it has a couple of quirks.

...

In earliest Latin, the RE- prefix became RED- before vowels and -h-. The words sounded better that way to their ears, or were easier to form in the mouth. Just as their COM- could be CON- or CO- or COR-, or otherwise depending on the sound that followed it. It helps when you imagine the sound-evolution of a language to think of the spoken form; until very recently, writing was just trying to keep up from a safe distance.

That Latin RED- form of RE- is preserved in a few English words: REDACT, REDEEM, REDOLENT, REDUNDANT, REDINTEGRATE.

REDEEM is the one that fools me, because DEEM is a good old Anglo-Saxon word, but this isn't that. The etymological sense of REDEEM is "to buy back, to ransom," and it breaks down to RE(D)- "back" + EMERE "to take, buy, gain, procure" (the same verb that's in, say, EXEMPT (v.) = EX- "out" + EMERE "to take"). The similarity to the native DEEM might be why some scribes of Middle English took the unusual (for them) step of translating Latin REDIMERE into native elements as AGAIN-BUY.

The other quirk is more subtle. In Latin RE- words in Old French and Italian, RE- sometimes appears as RA- and the following consonant is often doubled. English has borrowed a few of those. They sometimes co-exist with a straight-from-Latin doublet, or a latter French correction, e.g. RABBET (a doublet of REBATE), RAPPEL (a doublet of REPEAL).

There was a true RA- prefix (from Latin re- + ad-), but it never had much weight in English, so words with RA- in Old French usually returned to RE- in English (rabbet didn't because the accent had receded, and in later borrowings, such as rappel, RAPPROCHEMENT, RAPPORTAGE, etc., the words tend to keep their French forms).

The surprise in this bunch is RALLY (v.) "to bring together or into order again by urgent effort," from French rallier, from Old French ralier "reassemble, unite again," a compound in French, with the ra- shift, of RE- "again" + ALIER "unite."

Which makes it a doublet of the word we now must spell RE-ALLY (v.) "to form an alliance again, to connect or unite again," a native construction from the same etymological test tube that yielded RALLY.

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