lose the plot
"lose-the-plot" is a 11-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“lose the plot” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To cease to behave in a consistent or rational manner.
Corpus desk
Index EN-lose-the-plot · lose the plot · English
lose the plot · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "L" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | lose the plot |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “lose the plot” in English
Rare enough to double-check
lose the plot is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for lose the plot, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is lose the plot, spelled L-O-S-E- -T-H-E- -P-L-O-T.
Definition
- 1To cease to behave in a consistent or rational manner.
- 2To lose sight of an important objective or principle; to act contrarily to one's own interests through concentrating on relatively unimportant matters.
- 3Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see lose, plot.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how lose the plot appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits and the exit sign.
Right then I lost the plot. I did, man, I went over the edge.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.