People often misspell "losing" as "loosing". Has it always been so or is it a recent phenomenon?

Yes, it is an issue, along with a host of other misspellings, but the internet is not to blame, their lack of proper education is to blame.

I’ve been doing this recently! Odd.

I blame the people who made the two words so darn and confusingly close.

(I don’t think it’s new, or the internet’s fault. English words are hard to spell and there are so many varations and exceptions to pronunciation and spelling rules. It’s not just ‘loose’ and ‘lose’ that people misspell or misuse, it’s many, many, words. Like too/to. Or then/than. Or one I have an issue with: affect/effect—I don’t get the difference between these two, myself.)… Oh! that’s another example: me/myself/I…

I blame the complexities of English spelling.

Oh, and PLEASE! Orthography is not grammar.

It is more apparent recently. The problem is that loosing is a real word with a different meaning.

I never saw it until I saw it here, and I didn’t really start noticing it until a year or two ago. I don’t know if that means anything. You certainly can’t generalize based on my experience.

I suspect it’s be happening a long time, though.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s but didn’t start seeing loose for lose, on a regular basis, until the late 80s or early 90s. Had it occurred with present frequency earlier than this, I think (though I can’t know for sure) I would have noticed it.

I asked the question because I’ve noticed it a lot recently (the last few years). Trouble is, as marinelife mentions, ‘loosing’ means something quite different.

So, “I’m sick of loosing my underpants at the laundromat” sounds like the complaint of a compulsive streaker, not someone who can’t find their missing underpants.

I blame the internet because people see the careless spelling of others much more than they otherwise would. So much so that they eventually start to get bolshie about it and claim that there’s nothing wrong with spelling it that way, “Get with it grandpops! It’s how I roll!”.

This is why we have L8tr (later) and teh (the) and wuz and coz and rite and etc etc etc.

My fear is some day the hoards will rise up in cohesion and declare the new spelling of ‘Lose’ to be ‘Loose’ and ‘Loosing’ to be a fine replacement for ‘Losing’.

I was always a good speller. In 8th grade we had a spelling bee. I was put out early for spelling
‘lose’ as ‘loose.’ The teacher looked disappointed in me. I just thought, ‘Well, that was dumb.’
That was in the 1940’s. I remember it every time I write the word lose or loose. The problem is that goose, loose and choose are not pronounced alike. And lose, hose, nose are not pronounced alike. English is not an easy language to learn because of all the exceptions.

You can’t blame the Internet; it has always been so.

Oh better were I loose ten thousand breaths, Then euer liue in such vnseene disgrace. (1596 B. Griffin Fidessa vi. sig. B3v)

The same with our pronunciation – according to the rules of historical English sound change lose should be pronounced with the same vowel as go. We pronounce lose the way we do because we confused it with loose.

Because they should be spelled Looz and Loose. Much easier !