lose

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lose is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /luːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #879 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 16 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for lose, with forms such as "llose", "loes", and "losse". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Ls", "lot", "low", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English losen, from Old English losian, from Proto-West Germanic *losōn, from Proto-Germanic *lusōną, *luzōną, from Proto-Germanic *lusą. The modern pronunciation with /uː/ (instead of the /oʊ~əʊ/ that would be expected from Early Modern /ɔː/) i… 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 lose, spelled L-O-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.