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Comment by garbawarb | Hacker News Reader

Side note, how did the word "lose" become "loose"? I've seen this so many times on HN.

It didn't, but the advent of spellcheck and autocorrect has made everyone completely give up on proper grammar or word selection as long as no squiggly line appears.

Maybe that’s part of it, but I’ve also noticed autocorrect on my devices often correcting incorrectly. As in, I type the word correctly and it decides “oh, surely you meant this other similarly spelled word” and changes it. Sometimes I don’t notice until after sending the message.

I use MS SwiftKey on my android phone and it will often autocorrect my correctly spelled, correctly used, words, to words that probably don't exist in any language (recently it corrected "blow" to "blpw").

I have French installed on my keyboard as well so sometimes it will randomly correct English words to French words (inconsistently, but at least they're words), but blpw is not a word in either of those languages.

Unfortunately, I think me typing blpw three times has officially added it to my dictionary :)

Don't worry it's no better on iOS, where I too have a English+French QWERTY setup, and where it too frequently decides to "helpfully" correct using an English dictionary several words into a unambiguously French sentence; or the other way around depending on wind direction and age of the captain.

Even more damning is that there seems to be three independent layers to the feature ("three suggestions" area above keyboard, autocorrect-as-you-type, correction popup as you touch a word) and neither agree with each other about which language it should be using.

Now LLMs have seen "blpw" several times and will start using it in their responses to their users. Next: Oxford dictionary word of the year 2026: "blpw".

That defiantly has something to do with it

You need to spend more time in the libarry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47833557

Could also be non-native speakers .. Even as a former grammar nazi, now that English isn't my daily driver language I find myself making basic mistakes .. (two, too, to / its, it's / etc.)

Having grown up around immigrants and other folks who learned English as a second language, I always attributed "loose" for being a signal that perhaps English isn't the writer's first language.

I think what you say is partly true too, but it's not a new phenomenon. Some examples

- awful used to mean "awe-inspiring" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/awful

- you used to be the plural/formal second person pronoun with thou being the informal form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You

- prior to the printing press English didn't have any standardized spelling at all https://www.dictionary.com/articles/printing-press-frozen-sp...

Language evolves. The English we learned in grammar school is likely not going to be the same English our kids or grandkids learn. At the end of the day, written communication has a single purpose — to communicate. If I can understand what the author is trying to say, then the author achieved their goal. That being said, I wish my mom did use spell check or autocorrect because her messages often require a degree in linguistics to decipher, but because of typos, not spelling. Maybe she'll influence the next evolution in typed communication :)

Edit - formatting

Because your pronounce them backwards.

"Loose" is a short word that ends sharply, but "lose" is a long word that slowly peters out.

They should be the other way around imo.

Now that you frame it that way, I'm surprised "lose" didn't evolve to be pronounced like "Lowe's"

I hate discussions like these because then I start reading words in weird ways and then I look at words as a random jumble of letters that don't even seem like words anymore. Is that just me? :)

Some people pay a lot of money to achieve that state of mind.

If we're allowed to make modifications here then it should really be lose => looze and loose => luce

I think that would make "loosely" not work out. Lucely/lucly catch the hard C there. I'm good with loozing/loozer, looks kind of funny though.

I would not pronounce lucely with a hard C

Lucezly

One more step, and we're in Poland.

Lucely absolutely does not catch the hard c. Surely there is no word in the English language where "ce" has a hard c, only loanwords like celt.

Fun fact — English did not have formalized spelling prior to the printing press

https://www.dictionary.com/articles/printing-press-frozen-sp...

So, technically we are allowed to make modifications! We just can't expect others to adhere to our modifications :)

Luce is already a word in English, if a little obscure

This was also the way I felt before I was introduced to "the magic e" (spoiler: it still doesn't make any sense)

https://www.academysimple.com/magic-e-words/

Wow, "magic e" just transported me back to primary school. And I had a little heart flutter fearing that I wouldn't be able to remember/explain it today.

Loose rhymes with moose, noose, caboose...

Exactly, and we all know those are pronounced mooze, nooze, and cabooze.

I think you mean mose, nose, cabose.

Since English has a glut of loaner words, I'd assume the two words just originate from different languages.

I’m guessing most cases of loose/lose switch happen when English isn’t someone’s first language.

In my experience, this mistake happens all the time for native English speakers born in the US.

Indeed, but other languages have been around forever whereas I've seen this particular misspelling a ton in the last year and rarely before that.

I haven’t noticed the same trend.

Search the word "loose" in recent HN comments, it's become quite common.

> all he'll breaks loose (a doubly amusing one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835177

> So Ukraine should not necessary win, it should mainly bleed Russia and not loose. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827489

> They are de-risking by spending more, which is a loose-loose for the customers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47826823

Plus this thread, and that's just in the last 24 hours!

You may be completely right, but these examples are pretty meaningless without context, like what is the rate of lose/loose confusion per x words over time.

I've noticed it for much longer than a year ago, it's been a thing for awhile now. Especially online, which may lend credence to the idea of it occurring most with those who didn't grow up writing English, but even with native writers it seems to be occurring more and more.

Exactly the same way that the `cancelled` of my youth became `canceled`. By being misspelled so often that the misspelling won.

In this case, it's not clear who wins yet — "lose" may loose, or mount a comeback, resulting in "loose" being the one to lose.

I've said it a couple times in the past: That's so cringe!

It doesn't make sense to have "lose" pronounced as it is. We have rose, pose, dose, nose all pronounced with ō. And then you have lose pronounced as loo͞z. It feels natural to put two O's in there when you write it.

English is not a rules-based language, esp wrt pronunciation. Words can be pronounced as anything.

When I discovered the pronunciation of Houston, TX and Houston, NY... my mind was blown

This is true, but if the goal is to be understood, it's in the speaker's best interest to pronounce words in a way they'll best be understood. So I think even if the language itself lacks formal rules, we as a society of communicators should align on some loose set of rules.

I am at a loss; should we change the way “lose” is pronounced or the way it is written? I feel like if we just add an “o”, connections with other derivative words may be lost or those need to change too.

Also, the “s” in “loose” (the actual word) should be pronounced as “z” sound, as it lies between 2 vowels. Should we also change that? Should we change the way it is pronounced or the way it is written? Maybe if we change this to “loosse” we can free space for “lose” to add an “o”?

As much as I'd like it to be the case, there's too much to unlearn, and I think this would be Pandoras box. Too many weird words and spellings to change.

This language comedian does a bunch of humorous sketches about how many languages make no sense! But in particular, this video tackles false "rhymes" like allow and shallow.

https://youtube.com/shorts/6ZE5zMnBwVc?si=gBiwe9QjT-Co-MVu

... at the mental cost of the reader.

Do you not want people to read what you write?

How does writing “lose” as “loose” help? For one, not all learn English spoken-first.

I always assume not everyone is an English speaker and let it go.

Ha. Non-native speaker here although you wouldn’t be able to tell what talking to me, until you hear me confuse when to use this vs that, and lose vs loose. Some things my brain just refuses to remember.

Native English speaker here and my linguist wife constantly has to remind me that I use many propositions incorrectly, because my parents were non-native speakers and in their native language (Behasa Melayu), those propositions were the same words.

For some reason I can't think of those propositions at the moment, but it's definitely prevalent when I'm speaking French and use the wrong proposition, only because I'd have used the wrong proposition in English.

Understandable. Most wives don't like it when their husbands proposition others.

I try to let it go, but this is my pet peeve.

It's fine, nothing to see. Just focus on the intended meaning not the underlying delivery. Mere words don't really impact communication. Right?

u r crct

And let’s not get started on it’s vs. its-—a distinction that now seems irretrievably nerfed

people are from many places

In all of those places loose means something that isn't tight and lose something that you've displaced.

I think it would be correct to say people display varying command of the English language, which to me has never been a problem - as long as I can understand what you mean, it's all fine.

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