Tend

How to spell tend

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tend

What does tend mean?

1. verbTo be likely or inclined to behave in a particular way.
2. verbTo care for, look after, or attend to someone or something.

Tend in a sentence

• Prices tend to rise sharply during the holidays.

• A nurse stayed late to tend the injured patient.

• Older drivers tend to take fewer risks on the motorway.

• He likes to tend the vegetable patch every evening.

Where does tend come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This short word reaches back to the Latin verb tendere, which literally meant 'to stretch' or 'to reach toward'. English actually inherited two slightly different threads of this idea. The 'be inclined to' sense came through Old French tendre and kept the literal flavour of leaning or stretching in a particular direction, so to 'tend' toward something is to be stretched mentally that way. The 'look after' sense arrived a little differently: it began as a clipped form of 'attend', from the Latin attendere ('to stretch toward', and so 'to pay attention to'), which is why tending a garden or tending the sick still carries the notion of directing your care somewhere. The same tendere root shows up in a whole family of relatives such as 'tension', 'extend', 'intend', and 'tent', all of which involve stretching of one kind or another, and that shared core is a handy way to remember the plain spelling.

How the word is built

• tend (from Latin tendere: to stretch, reach toward)