Loss or lost?

Loss and lost belong to those pairs of words that can be problematic. Perhaps because they sound quite similar.

It is not uncommon to see loss used wrongly as a verb and lost wrongly as a noun:

(1) *No lives were loss in the accident.
(2) *His departure is a great lost.

Example (1) is taken from a recent news article below:

 AsiaOne - 14 April 2013

But loss is a noun, and never a verb. Lost, on the other hand, is the past tense and the past participle of the verb lose. Thus, the correct versions of (1) and (2) are as follows:

(3) No lives were lost in the accident.
(4) His departure is a great loss.