Rent

How to spell rent

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rent

What does rent mean?

1. nounA regular payment made by a tenant for the use of property or land.
2. verbTo pay for the temporary use of something, or to let something out for payment.
3. nounA torn opening or split made by pulling or tearing.

Rent in a sentence

• noun

  The rent on the flat increased by fifty pounds this year.

• verb

  They decided to rent a car for the long drive to the coast.

• noun

  There was a large rent in the old canvas tent.

• noun

  She set aside part of her salary each month to cover the rent.

• verb

  The couple plan to rent a cottage for the summer holidays.

• noun

  The storm left a rent down the side of the marquee.

Where does rent come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the early 1200s from the Old French rente, which meant 'revenue' or 'income' and could also describe a regular payment owed to a landlord. That French noun grew out of the Vulgar Latin rendita, a reshaping of the Latin reddita, meaning 'a thing given back' or 'a thing paid back', from reddere 'to return or render'. The earliest English use kept that financial flavour, referring to the periodic sum a tenant pays for the use of land or property. The completely separate meaning 'a tear or split' has a different ancestry: it comes from the native Old English verb rendan 'to tear', whose past tense produced 'rent', so a torn opening came to be called a rent. The two meanings look identical on the page yet arrived in English from opposite directions, one Romance and one Germanic.

How the word is built

• rent (single root; from Old French rente: revenue, income, ultimately from Latin reddita: a thing paid back)