leasing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of lease.

   The city has been leasing the old warehouse to a local brewery for years.

   The office router is leasing addresses to every laptop that joins the network.

   Note

   The renting verb's -ing form drops the final e and serves both sides of the deal. A landlord is leasing a building to a tenant; in everyday speech the tenant is leasing it from the landlord, and the preposition shows who owns what. On a network the same form describes a router handing out temporary addresses.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Gerund of lease.

   The firm specializes in the leasing of aircraft to smaller airlines.

   Equipment leasing let the startup spend its cash on hiring instead of machines.

   Note

   As a noun it names the activity or the trade rather than any one agreement: car leasing, equipment leasing, the leasing of aircraft. The agreement itself, the document that records it and the period it runs are each a lease, so a firm signs a lease but works in leasing.

3. 3
   LEE-zing/ˈliːzɪŋ/

   nounarchaic

   Lying or falsehood, or a particular untruth that someone tells.

   Her enemies spread leasings about her at court until the queen turned against her.

   fy on þi lawe / For al by lesynges þow lyuest · and lecherouse werkes.

   c. 1370, [William Langland], “[Passus II]”

   Note

   This word for lying has nothing to do with renting: it descends from Old English lēasung, which covered false witness, deceit, hypocrisy and empty talk. Langland and Skelton used it, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590) still sets "leasings, tales, and lies" side by side. Today it reads as archaic; a modern writer would simply say lies.

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