looservsloseWhich spelling fits?

Which to use

“looser” and “lose” are a confusable French pair: similar on the page, but distinct in meaning, check the gloss before you choose.

#49,194
“looser” frequency rank
#34,601
“lose” frequency rank
83795
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature looser lose
Definition Variante de loser. Variante de lauze.

Letter map: looser vs lose

Shared letters muted; letters that set looser and lose apart highlighted. Shared run: 4. looser runs 6 letters (CVVCVC) against lose's 4 (CVCV) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

6 ch
looser
4 ch
lose

Pair insight - looser / lose

looser and lose are indexed as a confusable French pair. We have no recorded pronunciation or part of speech for both members, so the spelling overlap is what we can show you: they differ by 2 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 83795, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

looser is recorded at frequency rank #49,194, classified as anoun, pronounced \lu.zœʁ\. lose is at rank #34,601, tagged as anoun.

Glosses for this pair are partially populated in our dataset, but the full side-by-side definitions above should still guide you to the right choice.

With a confusion score of 83795, this pair ranks #14,156 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of looser vs lose

Shared letters: elos. Private to "looser": r. Private to "lose": -.

"looser" · 6 letters · shape CVVCVC  ·  "lose" · 4 letters · shape CVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • looserllooser · looesr · looserr · loosre · loosser · losoer · oloser
  • losellose · loes · losse · lsoe · olse

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "looser" and "lose" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No. They differ by 2 letter(s) in length, but the dictionary glosses above give them different meanings, so swapping one for the other changes what the sentence says.
In ordinary French text, does "looser" or "lose" show up more?
"lose" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #34,601 in our French list, against #49,194 for "looser". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "looser" and "lose". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "looser" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "lose" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #14,156 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "looser" and "lose" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "loos vs looser". Nearby pair
  • Recorded mistypes exist for at least one side of this pair, useful when a spell-checker or OCR lands on the wrong form. See mistypes

Confusion rank #14,156 of 440,172 scored French pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list