lend

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lend is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lɛnd/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,057 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for lend, with forms such as "elnd", "ledn", and "lendd". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "LN", "let", "leo", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: 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 (“loa… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is lend, spelled L-E-N-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.