The other day I told someone that a friend had lent me a book. Then I started to wonder if that was the wrong word and I should have used loaned instead. I looked it up and it seems that loan/loaned and lend/lent are interchangeable. Do you think that's correct?
I think they are interchangeable. However, I have a feeling that the verb should be lend, if we wanted to be extra-correct. it's just a feeling.
FWIW, banks are lending institutions that provide loans.
True enough, as a noun there's only loan; as (American) verbs they seem to be interchangeable, with the caveat that loan still carries some stigma from a refuted nineteenth-century claim that its use as a verb was incorrect. Read discussion here.
tromboniator said:
True enough, as a noun there's only loan; as (American) verbs they seem to be interchangeable, with the caveat that loan still carries some stigma from a refuted nineteenth-century claim that its use as a verb was incorrect. Read discussion here.
I don't know that there was a claim otherwise, prior to its import to the U.S. in the 19th century, that loan was a verb, so it couldn't have been refuted. Sure, now loan is nearly unequivocally accepted as a verb in the U.S., but there was already a verb that did all the same work: lend. So, I believe the British purists have it right, though it's not worth fighting: loan is a noun; lend is a verb.