 Re: Hire vs Rent
OK - sorry. No - for British English too hire sounds odd in both your examples as a noun.
a) Cherry picker hires - here it's the plural that's odd. I checked with the Cobuild Concordancer and their 56m word corpus contains no example of hires as a plural noun. Go for rentals. Here are some examples :
... hotels and restaurants, TV programming and TV rentals. [p] Granada said that, by Friday, it had ...
... the proposed demerger of Thorn's music and rentals businesses later in the year.
... a demerger that would separate its music and rentals businesses.
THORN EMI, the music-to-rentals group, plans to go worldwide with its ...
Metcalf is keen to dispel the perception that rentals is a business in decline.
... best known as owner of the British-based Radio Rentals network.
b) You can get a CP hire. - here it's the collocation with get which doesn't work. But rental wouldn't collocate either. Again, no examples of either in the corpus. In this case the sentence sounds much better if you use the verb : You can hire/rent a CP
A note on rent, rental and hire as nouns. In B.Eng anyway, rent is usually used to signify the money you pay for renting something - I paid the rent for the house yesterday - whereas rental/hire describes the activity : He works for a car rental/hire firm
Hope that is more what you needed this time. |