Word.ws English Dictionary

lose-lose

lose-lose adjective: having negative outcomes for both or all parties involved; having multiple outcomes that are all bad. Also the ellipsis of lose-lose situation.

Adjective

lose-lose

  1. Having negative outcomes for both or all parties involved; having multiple outcomes that are all bad.
    • "It's a lose-lose situation. It can be turned into a win-win. We should be encouraging and supporting expensive bi-mode freight locomotives, especially where capacity is constrained.2024 October 30, Paul Clifton, “How can freight be a major part of rail's future?”, in RAIL, number 1021, page 57
    Antonyms:
    win-win

Also used as

lose-lose is also the ellipsis of lose-lose situation.

Antonyms of lose-lose

Questions about lose-lose

What does lose-lose mean?
Lose-lose means having negative outcomes for both or all parties involved; having multiple outcomes that are all bad.
What part of speech is lose-lose?
Lose-lose is an adjective.

Words near lose-lose in the dictionary

  1. lose time
  2. lose to plot
  3. lose touch
  4. lose track
  5. lose weight
  6. lose-lose
  7. loseable
  8. Loseby
  9. Losebys
  10. losed
  11. Losedows

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lose-lose (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-lose-lose.wav.

Cite this entry: “lose-lose.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lose-lose. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.