los

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for los is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lɒs/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,728 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A medium-sized wildcat, most of them part of the genus Lynx.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for los in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Lt", "LP", "Ls", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English lusk, from Old English lox, from Proto-West Germanic *luhs, from Proto-Germanic *luhsaz. Cognate with Scots los, Saterland Frisian Luks, Low German Luks, Dutch los, German Luchs, Luxembourgish Luuss. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is los, spelled L-O-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.