How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?

[Swift Griggs]

In my recent studies of electronics (I'm a noob for all practical 
purposes) I keep seeing folks refer to Verilog almost as a verb. I read 
about it in Wikipedia and it sounds pretty interesting. It's basically 
described as a coding scheme for electronics, similar to programming but 
with extras like signal strength and propagation included. Hey, cool! 

Why are folks referring to "Verilogging" and "doing a verilog" on older 
chips. Is there some way you can stuff an IC into a socket or alligator 
clip a bunch of tiny leads onto it and then "map" it somehow into Verilog? 
Is that what folks who write emulators do? Ie.. they exhaustively dump 
Verilog code for all the chips then figure out how to implement that in 
some computer programming language like C ? What do folks do for ROM chips 
and PLCs? I'd think they must dump the code and disassemble it. No? 

I'm just curious and this is a tough question to answer with Google since 
I'm pretty clueless and don't know the right words to search for. I notice 
people talk about correcting their Verilog code, so it must be somewhat of 
a manual process. I'm just wondering how someone even gets started with a 
process like that. 

-Swift