borrower

views updated May 14 2018

borrower a person who borrows from another. The Borrowers are central characters in a series of children's stories by Mary Norton, beginning with The Borrowers (1952); they are a family of tiny people who live under the floorboards in an old house and survive by ‘borrowing’ objects from the household overhead.
neither a borrower nor a lender be advising caution in financial dealings with others, originally from Polonius's advice to his son Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601), ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend.’