Tenaunt

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person who pays rent to live in or occupy a house, flat, land or other property owned by someone else
2. One who holds and occupies a dwelling or piece of land in return for regular payment to its owner
3. Someone who lives in a property under a rental agreement, paying the landlord for the right to occupy it

Etymology: The spelling "tenaunt" is simply an older form of "tenant", preserved from Middle English, when the word was written in many different ways before spelling settled. Its roots run back to the Latin verb "tenēre", meaning "to hold" or "to keep", which passed into Old French as "tenir". The French present participle "tenant" meant, in essence, "one who holds", and that is the sense the English word carries: someone who holds property or land under another's ownership, paying rent for the privilege. The "au" spelling in the older form reflects the Anglo-Norman French that shaped English legal vocabulary after the Norman Conquest, where the word appeared as "tenaunt" before the spelling was standardised toward the modern form. The word's core meaning, holding something, has stayed remarkably stable across centuries of use.