Other forms: loosed
Loose means not tight and not held firmly in place. Trousers you can get two fingers behind at the waist, a tooth a child keeps pushing at with their tongue, a screw that has worked its way out until the door handle rattles.
Loose covers anything free to move: loose change in your pocket, loose leaves instead of teabags, a dog loose in the park, a prisoner on the loose. It also means not exact — a loose translation, a loose arrangement to meet on Thursday. For undoing something the verb you want is loosen: loosen your belt, loosen the lid. Loose as a verb exists, but it sounds biblical, as in loose the arrow. And here is the mistake everybody makes: loose rhymes with goose, lose rhymes with news. You lose your keys. Your keys are loose only when they are rattling about at the bottom of your bag.
1adjectivelooseNot tight; with room to spare inside.~7%
“He wore a loose linen shirt in the heat.”
2adjectivefirmlyNot firmly fixed in place; able to move or come off.~27%
“One of the paving stones by the gate is loose.”
3adjectivetiedFree; not tied up, shut in or packaged.~7%
“Two of the goats got loose in the lane.”
4adjectiveexactNot exact or strict.~53%
“It is a loose translation, but it catches the tone.”
5verbsetTo set free or release.~6%
“He loosed the dogs into the field at dusk.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: baggy
Loose came from Old Norse lauss, from Proto-Germanic *lausaz — and that word is hiding in plain sight, because it is the -less on the end of hopeless and homeless: free of, without. Behind it stands a Proto-Indo-European root *lewh₁-, 'to untie, set free', which travelled the other way into Greek and comes back to English as the -lysis in analysis. Untying, all of it.
Proto-Indo-European
*lewh₁-
Old Norse
lauss
Middle English
loos
English, today
loose
From Middle English loos, from Old Norse lauss. From Middle English loos, los, lous, from Old Norse lauss, from Proto-Germanic lausaz, whence also -less, leasing; from Proto-Indo-European lewh₁- (“to untie, set free, separate”), whence also lyo-, -lysis, via Ancient Greek.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA