Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a paradigm in transfer learning that aims to recognize unknown categories by having a mere description of them. The problem of ZSL has been thoroughly studied in the domain of static object recognition, however, ZSL for dynamic events (ZSER) such as activities and gestures has hardly been investigated. In this context, this paper addresses ZSER by relying on semantic attributes of events to transfer the learned knowledge from seen classes to unseen ones. First, we utilized the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to create the first attribute-based gesture dataset, referred to as ZSGL, comprising the categories present in MSRC and Italian gesture datasets. Overall, our ZSGL dataset consisted of 26 categories, 65 discriminative attributes, and 16 attribute annotations and 400 examples per category. We used trainable recurrent networks and 3D CNNs to learn the spatio-temporal features. Next, we propose a simple yet effective end-to-end approach for ZSER, referred to as Joint Sequential Semantic Encoder (JSSE), to explore temporal patterns, to efficiently represent events in the latent space, and to simultaneously optimize for both the semantic and classification tasks. We evaluate our model on ZSGL and two action datasets (UCF and HMDB), and compared the performance of JSSE against several existing baselines in four experimental conditions: 1. Within-category , 2. Across-category , 3. Closed-set , and 4. Open-Set . Results show that JSSE considerably outperforms ( p < 0 . 05 ) other approaches and performs favorably for both the datasets in all experimental conditions.