Lose Not Loose

It is too common among programmers to use the word loose when the word ought to be lose.

Loose is pronounced loos (with an S sound, like a snake), and it means

Unfastened, unrestrained, uncontained, free
The opposite of tight
Out of prison
Unbound, unbundled, unattached
The opposite of dense
Irresponsible
Informal and relaxed
Sexually immoral
Inexact (e.g., a loose translation)
Characterized by a free movement of fluids in the body (e.g., a loose cough, loose bowels)

Or as a verb,

To release (something)
To loosen (something)
To detach (something)
To discharge (something)
To absolve (someone from something)
To relax (a standard)
To become loose

Lose, on the other hand, is pronounced looz (with a Z sound, like a snore), and it means

The opposite of find
The opposite of win
To have (something or someone) taken away or to give (something) up
To fail to keep control of (something or someone) (e.g., lose one's temper)
To lose perception of (someone or something) (e.g., I lost him in the woods.)
To fail to understand (a train of thought or logic)
To waste or squander (e.g., lose a day)
To wander from (one's way)
To elude or outdistance
To become slow by (a specified amount of time) (e.g., My watch lost five minutes since I last set it!)
To cause (someone) to lose (something)

I've seen this mistake frequently in email and such, but I really understood how common it was when Mandrake Linux warned me to be careful about performing a certain operation. Apparently I could "loose data." Oh no! I thought. We can't have all that loose data floating around! How would we ever get it back in the computer? It would be like stuffing toothpaste back into the tube.

On this same system, grep turned up even more instances, in user messages and comments. Here are some of the better ones.

You need to save the drawing before you close it. Otherwise you will loose the drawing. (Tie up that drawing!)
Do you agree to loose all the partitions? (We can't have all those partitions running about!)
we can loose the AUTOLOAD method (But there's no telling what it might do.)
Moreover, a glyph can loose some of its details, like serifs, at small sizes to become more readable... (But when you need those details back, how do you re-attach them?)
don't loose case distinction (Uh...)

-- TimKing

There's a boat in our marina with the name Loosers Weepers. (Of course it's a powerboat, you had to ask?)

It has become all too common for learned and otherwise quite competent people to be reckless in their attention to correct spelling or grammar. Such errors are found not only in the examples like the one cited above but even in such documents as that of a Doctoral Thesis! It seems that not only writers, but also those who review, exhibit the same characteristic.

Interestingly, I also erred in my first posting, by using "to" instead of "too" incorrectly as the fifth word. -- DonaldNoyes

Doctor's Thesis or Doctoral Thesis? -- JonathanTang

Analysist or Analyst?

It's usually the native English speakers who mistake words that have similar pronunciation. Lose vs loose I see mistaken almost explicitly only by native speakers, more often by the young ones. Where I live (Finland), I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone reasonably literate in English make that mistake. We, however, do have our own sets of mistakes regarding capitalization of words and such, since our own language has different rulesets on those.

RefactorEnglish instead of nag me, Loozer!