Loser

How to spell loser

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce loser

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does loser mean?

1. nounA person or side that fails to win a contest, election, or competition.
2. nounInformally, a person regarded as contemptible or as habitually unsuccessful in life.

Loser in a sentence

• The loser of the final still received a respectable cash prize.

• He dismissed his old schoolmate as a loser who never held a steady job.

• Every raffle has one winner and many a disappointed loser.

• The film follows a likeable loser who slowly turns his luck around.

Where does loser come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the verb 'lose' plus the agent ending '-er', which marks the person who performs the action. The verb itself descends from the Old English 'losian', meaning 'to perish, be destroyed, or fail to keep', which in turn grew from the noun 'los', meaning 'destruction' or 'ruin'. Over the medieval period the sense softened from outright perishing into the more ordinary idea of being parted from something or failing to win it, and by the late 1400s the noun 'loser' was in use for a person who suffers a loss. The harsher, modern slang sense of a contemptible or perpetually unsuccessful person grew in twentieth century American speech. The spelling trap is purely visual: 'lose' keeps a single 'o' even though it rhymes with 'choose', so 'loser' has one 'o', not the double 'o' of 'looser' (the comparative of 'loose').

How the word is built

• lose (root: to fail to keep or win)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)