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''rent'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''rent'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260615002359-00-⌔

rent - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

rent (countable and uncountable, plural rents)

  • A payment made by a tenant at intervals in order to lease a property.
    • ✤ I am asking £300 a week rent.
    • ✤ This time was most dreadful for Lilian. Thrown on her own resources and almost penniless, she maintained herself and paid the rent of a wretched room near the hospital by working as a charwoman, sempstress, anything.1
    • ✤ *We never ever argue, we never calculate/The currency we’ve spent/I love you, you pay my rent *2
  • A similar payment for the use of a product, equipment or a service.
  • (economics) A profit from possession of a valuable right, as a restricted license to engage in a trade or business.
    • ✤ A New York city taxicab license earns more than $10,000 a year in rent.
  • An object for which rent is charged or paid.
  • (obsolete) Income; revenue.
    • ✤ So bought an annual rent or two,/And liv’d, just as you see I do.3
  • (video games) An amount of virtual currency paid by a player to preserve their character, inventory, etc. between gameplay sessions in a multi-user dungeon.

Verb

rent (third-person singular simple present rents, present participle renting, simple past and past participle rented)

  • (transitive) To take a lease of premises in exchange for rent.
    • ✤ I rented a house from my friend’s parents for a year.
  • (transitive, informal) To grant a lease in return for rent.
    • ✤ We rented our house to our son’s friend for a year.
  • (transitive) To obtain or have temporary possession of an object (e.g. a movie) in exchange for money.
  • (intransitive, informal) To be leased or let for rent.
    • ✤ The house rents for five hundred dollars a month.

Noun

rent (plural rents)

  • A tear or rip in some surface.
    • ✤ [O]ne streak of copper-coloured light made a narrow rent between sea and sky.4
    • ✤ The brown paint on the door was so old that the naked wood showed between the rents.5
    • ✤ The oscillations were getting so severe that painters on the bridge learned to tie down their tins before a train passed. They found holes and rents in the iron but never reported them as they were never asked, and it wasn’t their job. These were deferential times, and few wanted to talk out of turn.6
  • A division or schism.
    • ✤ [T]he White House was considering sending Vice President Humphrey to Cairo to patch up the many rents in U.S.—Egyptian relations.7

Verb

rent

  • simple past and past participle of rend

Adjective

rent (comparative more rent, superlative most rent)

  • That has been torn or rent; ripped; torn.
    • ✤ Indeed, we could clearly make out the arch and stony banks of this second cave, and, from their rent and jagged appearance, discovered that, like the first long passage down which we had passed through the cliff before we reached the quivering spur, it had to all appearance been torn in the bowels of the rock by the terrific force of some explosive gas.8
    • ✤ Cleopatra is rent by a struggle between her newly-acquired dignity as a queen, and a strong impulse to put out her tongue at him.9

Pronunciation

  • enPR: rĕnt, IPA: /ˈɹɛnt/
    • Audio (UK): 🔊
    • Audio (UK): 🔊
    • Audio (US): 🔊
      • (pin–pen merger) IPA: /ˈɹɪ̟nt/
  • Rhymes: -ɛnt
  • Hyphenation: rent

Etymology 1

From Middle English rent, rente, from Old French rente, from Early Medieval Latin rendita, from Late Latin rendere, from Latin reddere.

Etymology 2

See rend.

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XVII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1987, “Rent”, in Actually, performed by Pet Shop Boys: ↩

  3. 1733–1737, Alexander Pope, [Imitations of Horace], London: […] R[obert] Dodsley [et al.]: ↩

  4. 1876, [Mary Elizabeth Braddon], “The Cruel Crawling Foam”, in Joshua Haggard’s Daughter […], volume I, London: John Maxwell and Co. […], →OCLC, page 1: ↩

  5. 1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, chapter X, in Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […], →OCLC: ↩

  6. 2020 September 23, Paul Bigland, “The tragic tale of the Tay Bridge disaster”, in Rail, page 81: ↩

  7. 2002, Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967: ↩

  8. 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, “The Spirit of Life”, in She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC, page 286: ↩

  9. 1898, George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra: ↩

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