Loathe

How to spell loathe

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce loathe

What does loathe mean?

1. verbTo feel intense dislike or disgust toward someone or something.

Loathe in a sentence

• Most taxpayers loathe filling in long forms every spring.

• Most commuters loathe the crowded train at rush hour.

Where does loathe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This verb descends from the Old English lāthian, meaning 'to be hateful' or 'to be disagreeable', which itself grew from the adjective lāth, glossed in plain English as 'hostile, hateful, or repugnant'. It belongs to a deeply Germanic family, with close relatives such as the German Leid (sorrow, harm) and the verb leiden (to suffer), all reaching back to a shared root for something painful or detestable. Over the centuries the meaning sharpened from a general sense of being odious into the modern active sense of feeling intense dislike or disgust toward something. The spelling carries a useful clue: the verb keeps its final e and is pronounced with a soft voiced 'th' as in 'breathe', which is exactly what separates it from the e-less adjective 'loath' (reluctant), pronounced with a hard 'th' as in 'cloth'. That tiny e is the trap, since 'loathe' and 'breathe' both add an e to mark the verb and the voiced sound.

How the word is built

• loath (Old English lāth: hateful, hostile)
• -e (verb ending)