tenant

Pluraltenants

Formstenants, tenanting, tenanted

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person who holds a lease and so has the right to occupy a property owned by someone else.

   The tenant complained to the landlord about the broken heating.

   Long-term tenants often have stronger legal protections against eviction.

   Similarrenter, leaseholder, lessee

   Oppositelandlord, lessor

   Note

   Behind the word is a participle: Old French tenant, 'holding', from tenir and ultimately Latin tenēre, 'hold, keep'. A tenant is literally the one who holds, which is why the same word can name a renter and the feudal landholder. Renter is the everyday equivalent, while lessee and leaseholder have the ring of a signed contract. Rentee exists but is rare.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A person or creature that occupies or holds possession of a particular place.

   For decades the lighthouse had no tenant but the wind and the gulls.

   The forest's quiet tenants scattered when the loggers arrived.

   Similaroccupant, dweller

   Note

   Poets stretch the word so that anything occupying a place can be its tenant. Cowley writes of 'the happy tenant of your shade' (1647), Byron calls Calypso's isles 'the sister tenants of the middle deep', and Tennyson in 1850 makes calm despair and wild unrest 'tenants of a single breast'. The usual pattern is tenant of plus the place. Dweller and occupant are the plainer choices.

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To live in or occupy a place as a dwelling.

   Swallows tenant the old barn each spring, filling the rafters with nests.

   Squatters had tenanted the derelict mansion for years before the city intervened.

   Similaroccupy, inhabit

   Oppositevacate

   Note

   The verb is at home in the passive, where a place is tenanted by its occupants. Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1835) speaks of land 'now tenanted by civilized man'. It can also be playful: in Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), a character's thin legs 'tenanted a pair of gambadoes'. It always takes a direct object, so you tenant a place but live in it.

4. 4
   verbtransitive

   To occupy a property as a tenant, holding it under a lease rather than owning it.

   The family has tenanted the estate's gatehouse since the war.

   Several merchants tenant the shops along the arcade.

   Similarlodge

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A person who owns real estate by holding it under a superior title rather than absolutely and free of any overlord.

   In common-law systems, a tenant holds an estate in land rather than owning the soil absolutely.

   Freeholders are tenants of the Crown, even though they may possess their land for life and pass it on.

   Note

   Property law keeps the feudal logic alive: land is held of someone, so even an owner can technically be a tenant. The contrasting term is allodial title, which means ownership that is absolute and free of any superior. In legal usage the word therefore covers freeholders who would never call themselves tenants in ordinary speech, which shows how the feudal landholder still shapes the vocabulary.

6. 6
   nounhistoricalcountable

   A person who held land under the feudal system, holding it from a lord in return for service, rent, or allegiance.

   A tenant of the manor was bound to provide labor during the harvest.

   Feudal tenants could be called to military service by the lord who granted their land.

   Similarvassal

   Oppositelord

   Note

   This is a historian's sense, belonging to the world of lords and manors. Here a tenant holds land from someone in return for obligations rather than renting a flat. The term spanned the whole social ladder, from great barons holding directly from the crown down to villeins bound to the land they worked. Readers will take it this way only when the feudal setting is clear.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   In multi-tenant software, any of several customers served by a single shared instance of an application, with each one's data kept separate.

   The cloud provider isolates each tenant so that one customer cannot access another's records.

   Adding new tenants to the platform required no extra servers, only configuration changes.

   Note

   Software borrowed the landlord's picture. Many customers share one running application the way tenants share one building, each kept to its own space. The word lives mostly in the hyphenated compound multi-tenant, as in multi-tenant hosting or a multi-tenant platform. The point of the metaphor is isolation within sharing: one instance, many separate occupants.

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