# tenant

Pronunciation: US say "TEN-uhnt" /ˈtɛ.nənt/; UK

## Noun

1. A person who holds a lease and so has the right to occupy a property owned by someone else.
   - Simple: A person who rents a home or other place from its owner.
   - _The tenant complained to the landlord about the broken heating._
   - _Long-term tenants often have stronger legal protections against eviction._
2. A person or creature that occupies or holds possession of a particular place.
   - Simple: Someone who lives in or holds a place, even without renting it.
   - _For decades the lighthouse had no tenant but the wind and the gulls._
   - _The forest's quiet tenants scattered when the loggers arrived._
5. A person who owns real estate by holding it under a superior title rather than absolutely and free of any overlord.
   - Simple: Someone who owns land or buildings but still holds them under the rules of a larger system.
   - _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._
6. A person who held land under the feudal system, holding it from a lord in return for service, rent, or allegiance.
   - Simple: Long ago, a person who held land in return for service or loyalty to a lord.
   - _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._
7. In multi-tenant software, any of several customers served by a single shared instance of an application, with each one's data kept separate.
   - Simple: In shared software, one of the customers who use the same system as others.
   - _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._

## Verb

3. To live in or occupy a place as a dwelling.
   - Simple: To live in or occupy a place.
   - _Swallows tenant the old barn each spring, filling the rafters with nests._
   - _Squatters had tenanted the derelict mansion for years before the city intervened._
4. To occupy a property as a tenant, holding it under a lease rather than owning it.
   - Simple: To rent and live in a place that belongs to someone else.
   - _The family has tenanted the estate's gatehouse since the war._
   - _Several merchants tenant the shops along the arcade._

## Origin

From Middle English tenaunt, from Anglo-Norman tenaunt and Old French tenant, the present participle of tenir ("to hold"), from Latin tenēre ("to hold, keep").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/tenant (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).