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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.
Except that the M-W entry I cited states that loan was first used as a verb in English in the thirteenth century. Lend was apparently derived from loan, but it predates the use of loan as a verb by more than a hundred years. That was the point of the article in the entry: unless you want to take the argument back to the thirteenth century, the purists are wrong. Not that it matters.
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