Lose, Lost, Loss, Loose

Have you ever lost your way to your home?

The GPS aids these days to enable people not to lose their way especially while driving, or when in a new place and the new place is digitally mapped

Are loose skirts and trousers back in fashion?

Is there a climatic influence on people wearing loose-fit clothes and tight-fit clothes?

What would be the loss to you if there is an economic recession?

LOSE:

Lose is an irregular verb (to lose-lose-lose/loses/losing-lost-lost). Its past tense and past participle are the same: lost. Lose means be defeated (India always loses in Olympics), something taken away from somebody due to natural or unnatural causes (The town lost the piped water facility due to vandalism), no longer having or maintaining a quality such as a moral character or mental stamina (Do not lose your will power to overcome the tragedy), be deprived of someone (Divorced males often lose their children in the custody battle) or something (I lost my laptop though my brother warned); be deprived of (He lost his parents in a span of two weeks), and stray from or wander from (He lost his way on the highway).

An easier way to remember the difference from lose and loose is: the opposite of win is? Lose.

A person who loses (in elections, sports, etc when contesting against an opponent) is a loser.

There are many losers in stock market investments, but losers can also become winners if only they have patience and persistence.

A gambler is always a loser unless realizing and gambling.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play written by Shakespeare.

LOST:

Lost is also an adjective referring to which cannot be recovered (Have we lost ethics in media?), confused or puzzled (She looked lost), gone, destroyed, dead, extinct. It also refers to someone when in deep concentration: engrossed, spellbound (She is lost in reading Harold Bloom’s How to read books and why).

LOST in idioms:

All is not lost (there is hope), get lost (go away), a lost cause (will fail, or failing, or failed), make up for lost time (compensate for the time lost), there is little or no love lost between him and her.

And, London Underground train network has a lost-property office where one can check whether the things they have lost are there or not.

“But after inheriting his titles (Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos) and one of England’s great estates, he astonished his associates, and no doubt himself, by managing to lose every penny of his inheritance in just nine years through a series of spectacularly unsound investments.” – Shakespeare by Bill Bryon

LOOSE:

Loose functions as an adjective and verb. Loose as an adjective means being free, unrestricted, untied; not fitting; promiscuous (referring to character of person, and the opposite word in this sense is chaste); and loosen is a verb (Cheer up, let us loosen up in the playground).

The opposite of tight is? Loose.

As a verb, loose means free from bonds, free from restraint, release from an obligation or penalty. Other verb forms of loose are: looses, loosing, loosened and loosen.

How to loose oneself into mysteries of life? Like Buddha loosened himself in meditation…

“Her stockings are loose on her ankles. I detest that : so tasteless. Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy, symbolistic.” – Ulysses by James Joyce.

LOSS:

Loss is a noun meaning losing, deprived of something (property, someone dear, money, etc. USSR and Germany suffered heavy losses in the World War II), forfeiting something that one has possessed or owned earlier. As a plural noun it refers to casualties, dead, death toll, fatalities; and deficiency, depletion (Our loss as a result of losing the family head). At loss is an idiom (not knowing what to do or act or say) referring to being confused, puzzled, baffled, in a state of helplessness, nonplussed.

Life is also about learning to endure the losses, personally and professionally.