Loan
nounA sum of money or an item lent to someone, expected to be returned or repaid.
How to spell loan
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce loan
What does loan mean?
- nounA sum of money or an item lent to someone, expected to be returned or repaid.
- verbTo grant the temporary use of money or an object to someone.
Loan in a sentence
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noun
The bank approved her loan for the new car.
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verb
She agreed to loan him the deposit until payday.
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noun
He is still repaying the student loan from his university years.
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verb
The library will loan each member up to ten books at a time.
Where does loan come from?
Language of origin: Old Norse
Loan comes from the Old Norse word lan, meaning 'a thing lent' or 'a grant', which was brought into northern England by Scandinavian settlers during the Viking era. It is closely related to the Old English verb laenan, meaning 'to lend', and to the noun laen, so the idea of lending money or goods has deep Germanic roots in English. The same family of words gave us the modern verb 'lend', which is really just 'loan' with an extra consonant added over time. By the early Middle Ages the spelling had settled towards the modern form, and the word came to cover anything granted temporarily on the understanding it would be returned. The persistent spelling trap is the homophone 'lone', meaning solitary; both sound identical, so the 'loan' that involves borrowing keeps the 'oa' that you can link to the idea of money 'owed'.
How the word is built
- loan (a single root noun/verb from Old Norse lán: a thing lent)
Words that sound like loan
They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.
- lone: Being the only one of its kind in a place; single and unaccompanied.
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