Tenant

How to spell tenant

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tenant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tenant mean?

1. nounA person who rents and occupies land or property owned by someone else.

Tenant in a sentence

• The landlord returned the deposit to the departing tenant.

• Each tenant in the building pays rent on the first of the month.

Where does tenant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin verb tenere, which meant simply 'to hold' or 'to keep'. Its present participle tenens, 'holding', passed into Old French as tenant, used both as a word for 'holding' and as a noun for the person who held a property. English borrowed it in the early 1300s in the legal sense of someone who holds land or a dwelling under another, especially by paying rent. The same tenere root sits behind a large family of English words, including tenure, tenacious, retain, and the closely confused tenet, which literally means 'he holds' and so came to mean a belief firmly held. Because tenant and tenet share that holding root and sound so similar, writers often blur the two; remembering that a tenant is an AgeNT who holds a lease helps keep the spelling apart.

How the word is built

• ten- (from Latin tenere: to hold)
• -ant (agent suffix: one who does)