Meaning & use
lose hope
Last updated
Meanings
phraseintransitive
to stop believing that something good will still happen.
Grammar: Used as a verb phrase with no object; it often comes before 'of' or 'that'.
Patterns
- lose hope of doing something
- lose hope that something will happen
- begin to lose hope
After three days in the hospital, his family began to lose hope.
Don't lose hope — the doctors are still trying new treatments.
She never lost hope that her brother would come home one day.
phraseintransitive
to stop trying because you feel a situation cannot improve.
Grammar: No object; often used in warnings or encouragement such as 'never lose hope'.
Patterns
- never lose hope
- be ready to lose hope
The team was losing hope after their fifth defeat.
It is easy to lose hope when you have been job-hunting for months.
He told the students never to lose hope, however hard the exams seemed.
Common combinations
- begin to lose hope
- The rescue workers began to lose hope as the night went on.
- lose hope of finding someone
- They had almost lost hope of finding the missing dog.
- never lose hope
- Her mother always told her never to lose hope.
- slowly lose hope
- As the weeks passed, he slowly lost hope of getting his money back.
- cause someone to lose hope
- The endless delays caused many voters to lose hope.
Synonyms and how they differ
- give up
- Focuses on stopping the effort itself, while 'lose hope' focuses on the feeling that nothing good will happen.
- despair
- Stronger and more literary; it suggests deep, settled hopelessness rather than a passing loss of hope.
Opposites
Word family
- hopeless adjective
- feeling or showing no hope; also used for a situation that cannot succeed
- hopefully adverb
- in a way that shows hope, or (informally) it is to be hoped
- hopeful adjective
- believing that something good will happen
- hopelessness noun
- the state of having no hope
Commonly confused: lose hope or loose hope?
lose hope vs loose hope
'Lose' is spelled with one 'o'; 'loose' means not tight and is a different word, so 'loose hope' is always wrong.
Practice
Which sentence uses 'lose hope' correctly?
Choose one answer.
'Lose hope of doing something' is the standard pattern, with no article and no plural. Option 2 wrongly adds 'the', option 3 uses a plural, and option 4 uses 'for' where the fixed phrase needs 'of'.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “lose hope”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.