loan

loan in business, sum of money borrowed at a particular interest rate. More generally, it refers to anything given on condition of its return or repayment of its equivalent. A loan may be acknowledged by a bond, a promissory note, or a mere oral promise to repay. Because of biblical injunctions against usury, the early Christian church forbade the taking of interest. In feudal European society, loans were little needed by the great mass of relatively self-sufficient and noncommercial peasants and serfs, but kings, nobles, and ecclesiastics were heavy borrowers for personal expenditures. Merchants and other townsmen, especially the Jews, were the moneylenders, and various devices were found for circumventing the prohibition of usury. With the rise of a commercial society, restrictions on the taking of interest were gradually relaxed. Today, banks and finance companies make most loans, usually on collateral , such as stocks, personal effects, and mortgages on land and other property, or on assignments of wages. Credit unions have attained some importance in making personal loans at relatively low interest rates, and microcredit programs and organizations, which offer small-scale loans, have proved useful, particularly in developing countries, in helping individuals to establish small businesses. A pawnbroker lends money on the security of articles left in his shop.

LOAN. An item of language given, as if by a lender, from one language to another, used both on its own and in such combinations as LOANWORD, LOAN TRANSLATION, LOAN BLEND, and loanshift. The commonest loans are single words: pizza (from Italian to English), babysitter (from English to French, German, and other languages). Once adopted, loans usually show some adaptation: in sound, French garage, variously pronounced in English; in form, English night taken into Italian as a CLIPPING of nightclub; in grammar, English nouns borrowed into French and provided with a gender, la babysitter (feminine), le golf (masculine). Verbs adapt to the morphology of the borrowing language: in German, babysitten to babysit, past tense babysittete, past participle gebabysittet. See ASSIMILATION, BORROWING, CALQUE, CODE-MIXING AND CODE-SWITCHING, FOREIGNISM.

loan / lōn/ • n. a thing that is borrowed, esp. a sum of money that is expected to be paid back with interest: borrowers can take out a loan for $84,000. ∎  an act of lending something to someone: she offered to buy him dinner in return for the loan of the car. ∎ short for loanword. • v. [tr.] (often be loaned) borrow (a sum of money or item of property): the word processor was loaned to us by the theater| he knew Rob would not loan him money. PHRASES: on loan (of a thing) being borrowed: the painting is at present on loan to the gallery. ∎  (of a worker or sports player) released to another organization or team, typically for an agreed fixed period. DERIVATIVES: loan·a·ble adj. loan·ee / ˌlōˈnē/ n. loan·er n.