louse up
"louse-up" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“louse up” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 8
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To mess up; to confuse; to put into a state of disorder.
Corpus desk
Index EN-louse-up · louse up · English
louse up · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 8 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 | louse up |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 8 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “louse up” in English
Rare enough to double-check
louse up is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for louse up, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is louse up, spelled L-O-U-S-E- -U-P.
Definition
- 1To mess up; to confuse; to put into a state of disorder.
- 2To mistreat (someone).
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how louse up appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
To be loused up by Humbolt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.
The recent flu epidemic that loused up all my plans to see Pat Bond.
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.