extend

The causative partner of the intransitive "grow" meaning: here someone does the extending, and the thing enlarged becomes the object, whether a boundary, a gallery or a zone. Run overlaps with it when a line or route is carried further. The test is simple: if you can ask "extended what?", you are in this sense.

Courtesy and finance share this verb: one extends sympathy, an invitation, or credit. The recipient follows to, as in extending sympathy to the suffering or credit to a valued customer. The phrasing is more formal than offer or give, which is why it suits letters, speeches and banking.

No growth is involved here: a desert that extends for miles has simply always been that big. The verb measures rather than changes, and it usually takes a phrase of distance or direction, such as for miles, across borders, or deep beneath the hills. Compare the "grow larger" meaning, where flooding extends because it is spreading. The same sentence shape can carry either meaning, and context decides which.

Here the word stays closest to its Latin root, extendō, "I stretch out", which came through Anglo-Norman extendre into Middle English. In anatomy it is the opposite of flexion. Extending a joint opens the angle between its bones, so an arm is extended when it is straight and flexed when it is bent.

In code, the subclass is the subject and the parent class is the object: Person and Dog extend Animal, never the reverse. Inherit, its near synonym, works through a preposition instead, so a subclass inherits from its parent. The two verbs describe one relationship with different grammar, and in both the more specific class is the one doing the work.

Kitchen thrift and trade fraud share this verb. Stretching a stew with more potatoes, or skim milk with water as Fred Grundy advised pig farmers in The American Agriculturist (1894), is honest economy. Lewis and Newhall's History of Lynn (1897) sets "extended" liquors in inverted commas, a wink at the euphemism for watered drink. The usual construction is extend X with Y, and context tells whether Y is a supplement or a cheat.

Service members use it with no object at all. A Marine writing in The Leatherneck (1993) says simply, "I liked it so much I extended." The term of service is understood, which separates this American military usage from the "make last longer" meaning, where the thing prolonged, such as a contract or a trip, must be named.

A term of English legal procedure built on the noun extent. A writ of extent let the Crown or a creditor take a debtor's lands, and to extend those lands was to have them valued and assigned toward the debt. The verb and the writ belong together, and outside that procedure this meaning does not occur.