Don’t loose your dictionary

Today I would like to discuss a pet peeve of mine: the confusion of the words loose and lose. I see this all the time on the Internet, and it drives me crazy.

First, the definitions:

Loose
Adj:

• Free from restraint. A loose dog roaming the street.
• Not fitting tightly. Loose clothing.
• Not bundled together. Wearing your hair loose. Loose computer parts in the bin.

Adv:

• In a loose manner or loosely. Loose-flowing hair.

Verb:

• To free from restraint; let loose.
• To shoot (a weapon). Loose the torpedoes!
• To make less tight.

Lose (lost, losing)
Verb

• To find yourself without something by accident. Don’t lose this card. I lost my keys.
• To suffer the deprivation of something. To lose one’s savings.
• To get rid of. Lose weight. She “lost” the nerdy guy’s phone number.
• To not win a game, contest, or conflict. UCSB lost to Cal Poly.
• To cause one to lose a game, contest, or conflict. Hitler lost the war the day he attacked the Soviets.

Usually when I see this error, the word loose is used where lose would actually be correct:

• Don’t loose sight of him. WRONG
• He always looses his keys. WRONG
• The Dodgers should always loose to the Giants. WRONG (syntactically, anyway)

These should be:

• Don’t lose sight of him.
• He always loses his keys.
• The Dodgers should always lose to the Giants.

Then there are the cases where either word is syntactically correct, but the sentence is given a very different meaning:

• Lose the dog. The dog has been lost. Where’s the dog?
• Loose the dog. Release the dog to attack the bad guys!

As you can see, these two words have very different meanings. Let’s try not to mix them up.

Tags: bad grammar, gripe, Writing