Lent

How to spell lent

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lent

What does lent mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'lend': gave something to someone for temporary use, expecting it back.

Lent in a sentence

• The bank lent them the money for the deposit.

• She lent me her umbrella when the rain started.

Where does lent come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'lend', which descends from the Old English lǣnan, meaning 'to grant something for temporary use'. That verb was built on the noun lǣn, meaning 'a loan or gift', a word shared across the Germanic languages and related to modern Dutch 'lenen' and German 'leihen'. The modern infinitive 'lend' actually gained its final 'd' by analogy with other verbs, but the old past form survived more simply as 'lent', which is why the spelling drops cleanly to a single 't'. The capitalised season 'Lent', the period before Easter, comes from a completely separate Old English word, lencten, which literally meant 'spring' and referred to the lengthening of the days; that origin is unrelated to lending despite the identical modern spelling. The everyday trap is not the word itself but its sound, since it matches the British past tense 'leant' (from 'lean').

How the word is built

• lend (Old English lǣnan: to grant temporarily)
• -t (past-tense ending)