Lend

How to spell lend

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lend

What does lend mean?

1. verbTo give someone the temporary use of something on the understanding that it will be returned.

Lend in a sentence

• Banks will only lend money to applicants with a steady income.

• She offered to lend him an umbrella until the rain stopped.

Where does lend come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb lǣnan, meaning 'to grant something for temporary use', which was built on the noun lǣn, a loan or grant. That noun is the same ancestor that gives us the modern word 'loan', so lend and loan are essentially two branches of one family, the verb staying close to its Germanic roots while loan came down a slightly different path. The final 'd' is a later addition: the original verb had no 'd' at the end, but by the medieval period an extra 'd' crept onto the spelling, much as it did in 'sound' and 'thunder'. The root is firmly Germanic and is related to similar words across the older Germanic languages for granting or letting someone use a thing. Because the everyday spelling is short and phonetic, the only real trap is remembering that the past tense is 'lent' rather than 'lended'.

How the word is built

• lend (from Old English lǣnan, to grant temporarily)