Other forms: lent, lending, lends
To lend is to give somebody something they will give back. Lend me a pen, lend him the money, the library lends books.
The pair with borrow is the classic learner difficulty: you lend to somebody and you borrow from them. Lend me your car and can I borrow your car describe the same event from opposite sides. The past tense is lent. Lend also means to give or add a quality: it lends the room some warmth, lend weight to an argument. Note lend a hand, meaning to help, and lender, the institution making a loan.
1verblendTo give something to somebody who will give it back.
“He lent her the car for a week and got it back in a month.”
2verbaddTo give or add a quality to something.
“The lamps lend the whole room a bit of warmth.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
lend is a way of giving temporarily.
Old English laenan comes from laen, a loan — the n belongs to the noun, and the verb was originally to give a loan. The d was added in Middle English by analogy with verbs like send and bend, so lend is a d that wandered in.
Proto-Germanic
*laihnijaną — to loan
Proto-West Germanic
*laihnijan
Old English
lǣnan — to lend; give, grant, lease
Middle English
lenen
English, today
lend
From earlier len (with excrescent -d, as in sound), from Middle English lenen, lænen, from Old English lǣnan (“to lend; give, grant, lease”), from Proto-West Germanic laihnijan, from Proto-Germanic laihnijaną (“to loan”), from Proto-Germanic laihną (“loan”), from Proto-Indo-European leykʷ- (“to leave, leave over”). Cognate with Scots len, lend (“to lend”), West Frisian liene (“to lend, borrow, loan”), Dutch lenen (“to lend, borrow, loan”), Danish låne (“to lend, loan”), Swedish låna (“to lend, loan”), Icelandic lána (“to lend, loan”), Icelandic léna (“to grant”), Latin linquō (“quit, leave, forlet”), Ancient Greek λείπω (“leave, release”). See also loan.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA