Loan

//loʊn// noun, verb, slang

noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An act or instance of lending, an act or instance of granting something for temporary use.

    "Because of the loan that John made to me, I was able to pay my tuition for the upcoming semester."

  2. 2
    An area of uncultivated ground near a village or farmhouse. Northern-England, Scotland

    "the Loan of Turchloy, the Black Loan"

  3. 3
    a word borrowed from another language; e.g. ‘blitz’ is a German word borrowed into modern English wordnet
  4. 4
    A sum of money or other property that a natural or legal person borrows from another with the condition that it be returned or repaid over time or at a later date (sometimes with interest).

    "All loans from the library, whether books or audio material, must be returned within two weeks."

  5. 5
    the temporary provision of money (usually at interest) wordnet
Show 2 more definitions
  1. 6
    The contract and array of legal or ethical obligations surrounding a loan.

    "He made a payment on his loan."

  2. 7
    The permission to borrow any item.

    "Thank you for the loan of your lawn mower."

Verb
  1. 1
    To lend (something) to (someone). US, ditransitive, informal, usually

    "In the course of a correspondence that passed between us at this period, he mentioned, to my utter astonishment, the fact of his having loaned Neilson 81000 to buy my bill on Maryland; and stated that he could not proceed to make the payment until Neilson refunded the money."

  2. 2
    give temporarily; let have for a limited time wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
lendcreditaccommodateaccommodate withaccommodationadvance

Antonyms

All antonyms
borrow

Example

More examples

"You can get a loan from a bank."

Etymology

Etymology 1

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, North Frisian leen (“fief; loan; office”), Scots lane, lain, len, Old English lǣn. More at lend.

Etymology 2

From Scottish Gaelic lòn (“marshy meadow”) (compare lèana (“wet meadow, marsh, meadow”)).

Related phrases

NINA loanNINJA loanair loanauto loanback-to-back loanbehest loanblanket loanbridge loanbridging loanbullet loancall loancaveat loan

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.