locked

1. 1
   adjective

   Closed and held fast by a lock, so it cannot be opened without a key or the right combination.

   Every drawer in the office was locked when the auditors arrived.

   The gate stayed locked all weekend while the owners were away.

   Similarsecured, padlocked, barred

   Oppositeunlocked, open, unsecured

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past tense and past participle of lock.

   He locked the safe and slipped the key into his pocket.

   The gates were locked at sunset by the night warden.

   Note

   A regular past form that serves both sides of the verb. Transitively someone locks something (she locked the safe); intransitively a thing locks by itself, as when a wheel or a knee freezes in place (his knees locked). With be, the participle shades into the adjective "secured by a lock": the door was locked can report an action or simply describe a state.

3. 3
   adjective

   Restricted by software so that the device works only with a single mobile carrier.

   The handset arrived locked to one carrier for the length of the contract.

   Phones sold at a discount are often locked until the balance is paid off.

   Similartied

   Oppositeunlocked

   Note

   A phone-trade term that always implies a particular network, and the construction usually names it: locked to one carrier. The restriction sits in the handset's firmware or SIM settings, which reject competitors' SIM cards until an unlock code is applied. Its opposite, unlocked, is the selling point for phones that accept any carrier's SIM.

4. 4
   adjective

   Held under a mutex or similar token, so that only one process can access the resource at a time.

   The record stayed locked until the first transaction committed.

   Threads block whenever a resource is already locked by another worker.

   Oppositeunlocked

   Note

   A programmer's word for a resource someone else is holding. The lock exists to stop two threads or processes from changing shared state at once, which would cause a race condition. Anything else that wants the resource must wait until the holder releases it. Users meet the word mostly as a refusal: a locked file can't be deleted or edited until the program using it lets go.

5. 5
   adjectiveIreland

   Extremely drunk; heavily intoxicated by alcohol.

   She was so locked she couldn't remember getting home.

   Half the crowd was already locked before the band even came on.

   Similardrunk, plastered, hammered, wasted, sloshed

   Oppositesober

   Note

   Irish English for drinking well past steadiness, perhaps shortened from airlocked. It takes intensifiers readily despite meaning an extreme already: Samantha Shannon's The Mask Falling (2021) has a character recall a night of absinthe shots with "We were absolutely locked." Outside Ireland a listener may hear only the literal sense, so it is safest among people who know the usage.

6. 6
   adjective

   Having the hair formed into dreadlocks; wearing dreadlocks.

   His hair had been locked since his teenage years.

   After years of braids, she finally got her hair locked over the summer.

   Similardreadlocked

   Note

   Here the word grows from locks of hair, not from the lock on a door. That is why it also turns up spelled loc'd, alongside the fuller dreadlocked. It can describe the hair itself (her hair has been locked for years) or the person wearing it (a locked drummer), and context usually keeps it apart from the "secured by a lock" meaning.

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