908 Using Loose and Lose

Are you lost? Losing your way with the words "loose" (lus) and "lose" (luz)? “She had to loosen her slacks, so she dieted to lose weight and then her slacks were loose.” “Loose morals caused him to lose his way.”

lose, lost, losing--a verb
loose, looser, loosest--an adjective
loosen, loosened, loosening--a verb

“People who study errors in language make a systematic distinction between inadvertent errors -- in the case at hand, slips of the pen or typos -- and another type of mistake, which arises from imperfect command of the conventions at work in the larger community of language users -- in the case at hand, "spelling errors" in the sense of errors involving the conventions of spelling. Writing or typing "teh" for "the" is an inadvertent error, and a very common one. Writing or typing "loose" for the present tense or base form /luz/ of the verb whose past tense is spelled "lost" is, I maintain, almost always something else; people who spell this way, and there are a great many of them, almost always intend that spelling (while those who spell "teh" surely do not intend that spelling).”

Read the whole article by Arnold Zwicky at Language Log.