Other forms: loans, loaned, loaning
A loan is money someone lends you now that you pay back later, with extra on top. The bank loan for a car, a student loan, twenty pounds from a friend until Friday.
Not only money: a painting can be on loan to a museum, and a footballer on loan to another club for a season. You take out a loan and you pay it off, and the extra is called interest. Watch the verbs — you lend money to someone, they borrow it from you, and the loan is what results. American English uses loan as a verb too, loan me a pen, where British English prefers lend. A loanword, finally, is a word one language has taken from another: pyjamas, sofa, karaoke.
1nounloanA sum of money lent to someone, which they have to pay back.~54%
“They took out a loan to fix the roof.”
2nounperiodSomething lent to someone for a period of time.~42%
“The painting is on loan from a gallery in Vienna.”
3verblendTo lend something to someone.~4%
“The museum loaned us three of the smaller pieces.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 24 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
loan is borrowed money.
Loan came from Old Norse lán, carried in by Norse settlers, from a Proto-Germanic word that also gave German Lehen, a fief — land lent out by a lord. The Indo-European root behind it, *leykʷ-, meant to leave something over. A loan is what you leave with someone else for a while.
Proto-Indo-European
*leykʷ- — to leave (over)
Proto-Germanic
*laihną
Old Norse
lán
Middle English
lone
English, today
loan
From Middle English lone, lane, from Old Norse lán, from Proto-Germanic laihną, from Proto-Indo-European leykʷ- (“to leave (over)”). Cognate with Icelandic lán, Swedish lån, Danish lån, German Lehen (“fief”), Dutch leen (“fief”), West Frisian lien, frr leen (“fief; loan; office”), Scots lane, lain, len, Old English lǣn. More at lend.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA