Losing

How to spell losing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce losing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does losing mean?

1. verbIn the process of being deprived of something, or failing to win a contest or competition.

Losing in a sentence

• The company kept losing money every quarter until it closed.

• Our team was losing badly by half time.

Where does losing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'lose', which descends from Old English 'losian', meaning 'to perish' or 'to become lost or destroyed'. That verb grew out of the noun 'los', meaning 'destruction' or 'ruin', and it belongs to a wider family of Germanic words tied to the idea of loosening, releasing, or coming apart. Over the centuries the spelling settled with a single 'o' and a single 's', giving the modern 'lose' and its participle 'losing'. The famous spelling trap is that 'lose' rhymes with 'choose' yet keeps only one 'o', so writers often double it into the unrelated word 'loosing', which actually means setting something free. Remembering that 'losing' has the same single 'o' as 'lose' itself is the cleanest way to keep them apart.

How the word is built

• los- (from the verb lose)
• -ing (present participle suffix)