Miscellaneous Entries.
renege; renegue; *renig. The first is the preferred form in American English; the second is the standard spelling in British English, although the first is making inroads. *”Renig” is a variant spelling in American English.
renounceable; *renunciable. The latter is a needless variant.
rent, n.; rental, n. Generally, prefer “rent” instead of the noun “rental” whenever it will suffice. Reserve “rental” for a record of rent payments received {the Grosvenor Estate rentals were incomplete} or the property itself {he owns only one small rental}.
rent, vb.; lease, vb. In American English, these terms are used both for what the tenant does and for what the landlord does. In British English, the lessor “leases” (or “lets”) and the lessee “rents.” Thus, in American English, “rent” is ambiguous since it may refer to the action taken by either party. The word has had this double sense from at least the 16th century. Both the lessee and the lessor are “renters,” so to speak, though this term is usually reserved for tenants.
*Invariably inferior forms.
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Quotation of the Day: “If it were not possible to attach several senses to one word, this would mean a crushing burden on our memory: we would have to possess separate terms for every conceivable subject we might wish to talk about. Polysemy is an invaluable factor of economy and flexibility in language; what is astonishing is not that the machine occasionally breaks down, but that it breaks down so rarely.” Stephen Ullmann, Semantics 168 (1962).
