to be at a loss: to find no way through a difficulty, and so not know what to think or do
The picture behind this word is a traveler who reaches a river with no ford, a road that gives out, a problem with no route through it. It is built from a Greek word for a "way" or "passage", with a prefix that cancels it: to be without a way. From that one image the word stretches to cover running out of money, being trapped in a tight spot, and not knowing what to make of something. English has to choose between "perplexed" and "stuck", but the Greek holds both at once, because being at a loss is simply what having no way out feels like from the inside.
In the New Testament the word always names this state of finding no way forward, applied to very different kinds of dead end:
- Herod cannot square what he hears from John with what he means to do, and finds no way out of it (Mark 6:20).
- The women at the empty tomb cannot make sense of what they are seeing (Luke 24:4).
- The disciples at the last supper cannot tell whom Jesus means (John 13:22).
- A Roman governor is out of his depth in a case he cannot fit into any category he knows (Acts 25:20).
- Paul is hard pressed on every side yet is never trapped past all hope (2 Corinthians 4:8).
- Paul is at his wits' end over converts he cannot reach (Galatians 4:20).
Two patterns stand out. In Luke's writings the word marks the pause before understanding arrives: people are at a loss, and then God's action or God's word makes sense of the moment. Luke's favorite form is the intensified διαπορέω, "to be thoroughly at a loss". In Paul it marks a frontier. He can honestly say he is at a loss, but he sets it against a stronger relative, ἐξαπορέω, which pushes the same picture all the way to despair, and he insists he never crosses that line. Being perplexed is human; being crushed past hope is what God's power holds off.