Lockout

How to spell lockout

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lockout

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lockout mean?

1. nounAn action in which an employer closes a workplace or bars employees from entering as a way of forcing terms during a dispute.
2. nounA situation in which a person is prevented from entering a place or accessing a system, often after too many failed attempts.

Lockout in a sentence

• The factory lockout left hundreds of staff without pay for weeks.

• Three wrong passwords triggered a temporary lockout on the account.

• Union leaders condemned the lockout as a tactic to break the strike.

• The security lockout kept everyone in the lobby until the alarm was reset.

Where does lockout come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound built from two very old native words. The first element, 'lock', comes from the Old English 'loc', meaning a fastening or an enclosure, the same root that gives us the bolt on a door. The second element, 'out', descends from the Old English 'ut', meaning away from the inside. Joined together, the word literally describes the act of shutting someone out, and it appears in industrial English in the late 1800s to name the tactic by which employers barred workers from the premises during a dispute. Because both halves are common everyday words, the only spelling care needed is remembering it is written as one solid word rather than two, mirroring its opposite number, 'strike'.

How the word is built

• lock (to fasten, from Old English loc)
• out (adverb, from Old English ut) forming a compound noun