Locked

How to spell locked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce locked

What does locked mean?

1. verbFastened or secured something with a lock, or became fixed and unable to move; the past tense and past participle of 'lock'.

Locked in a sentence

• She locked the front door before driving to work.

• The storeroom stayed locked over the entire holiday weekend.

Where does locked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun 'loc', meaning a bolt, bar, or fastening, and the related verb 'lucan', meaning 'to close or shut up'. These come from a common Germanic source that also gave Dutch 'luiken' and shared roots with words for enclosing and joining. Over time the noun came to mean the familiar mechanical device that secures a door, and the verb developed the everyday sense of fastening something with that device. The form 'locked' is simply the regular past tense and past participle, made by adding the '-ed' ending; the only spelling point worth noting is the 'ck' that keeps the short vowel before that ending. The same old root also lies behind 'lock' in the sense of a section of a canal and, more distantly, the 'lock' of hair, though that last sense came from a separate but related Germanic word.

How the word is built

• lock (to fasten with a bolt or key)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)