loath

UK/ləʊθ/US/loʊθ/

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,952 of 15,258neutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Loath means very unwilling to do something. You will do it, and every part of you objects.

It always takes to and a verb: loath to admit it, loath to interfere. That construction is the only place the word appears. The real difficulty is the neighbouring word loathe, with an e, which is a verb meaning to hate intensely, and mixing them up is one of the commonest slips in written English. Loath is an adjective and loathe is a verb, and that is the whole distinction.

Definitions of loath

1adjectiveloathVery unwilling to do something.C1
“I am loath to disturb him at this hour.”

Where it comes from

Loath was once much stronger. Old English lāð meant evil or loathsome, the same word that gives loathe, so being loath to do a thing is a worn-down form of hating it.

Proto-Indo-European
*h₂leyt- — to do something abhorrent or hateful
Proto-Germanic
*laiþaz — loath; hostile; sad, sorry
Old Norse
leið
Old English
lāð
Middle English
lōth — loath; averse, hateful
English, today
loath

Built from

lāþ · Old English — evil; loathsome
leiðr · Old Norse — uncomfortable; tired
Leid · German — grief, sorrow, woe; affliction, suffering; harm, injury; wrong
lēth · Old Saxon — evil person or thing

From Middle English lōth (“loath; averse, hateful”), from Old English lāð, lāþ (“evil; loathsome”), or Old Norse leið, leiðr (“uncomfortable; tired”) from Proto-Germanic laiþaz (“loath; hostile; sad, sorry”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European h₂leyt- (“to do something abhorrent or hateful”). The word is cognate with Danish led (“disgusting, loathsome; nasty”), Dutch leed (“sad; (Belgium) angry”), French laid (“ugly; morally corrupt”), Catalan lleig (“ugly”), Icelandic leiður (“annoyed, vexed; sad; (archaic or poetic) annoying, wearisome”), Italian laido (“filthy, foul; obscene”), Old Frisian leed, Old High German leid (Middle High German leit, modern German leid (“uncomfortable”), Leid (“grief, sorrow, woe; affliction, suffering; harm, injury; wrong”)), Old Saxon lêð, lēth (“evil person or thing”), Swedish led (“bored; tired; (archaic) disgusting, loathsome; evil”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire

First appears in chapter 27 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

loath in the wild

Neumann was not loath to pour contempt on the views of people like me with all the fervour at his command.
Hans Neumann
Desperately wishing to avoid a civil war, Lincoln ended with this plea: I am loath to close.
Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address
The Aundh Experiment was an unusual idea in pre-independence India, where the rulers of princely states were loath to hand over their power.
Aundh Experiment
Increasing competition by considering foreign designs is something the US government is especially loath to do.
Helicopter manufacturer
The Lancashire cotton industry was loath to invest in hand-threaded shuttles, or in the more productive Northrop automatic looms with self-threading shuttles, which were introduced in 1902.
Kissing the shuttle

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

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