Word.ws English Dictionary

-lock

-lock suffix: action or proceeding, practice, ritual.

Suffix

-lock

  1. (idiomatic) Action or proceeding, practice, ritual

Origin of -lock

From Middle English -lok, -lak, -lac, from Old English -lāc (suffix denoting activity or action), from Proto-Germanic *-laikaz, suffixed form of Proto-Germanic *laiką (“play, sport, fight, activity”), *laikaz (“game, dance, hymn, sport”) (Old English lāc), from Proto-Indo-European *leyg- (“to bounce, shake, tremble”). Cognate to Old Norse -leikr. The etymology of the suffix is the same as that of the noun lāc "play, sport", also "sacrifice, offering", corresponding to obsolete Modern English lake (dialectal laik) "sport, fun, glee, game", cognate to Gothic laiks "dance", Old Norse leikr "game, sport" and Old High German leih "play, song, melody" (> Old French lai "song, lyric, poem, lay"), obsolete or dialectal German Leich. Old English līcian ("to please", Modern English like) is from the same root. In modern English, the noun has been reintroduced through the cognate Swedish lek as a specialist term referring to mating behaviour.

Questions about -lock

What does -lock mean?
-lock means action or proceeding, practice, ritual.
What part of speech is -lock?
-lock is a suffix.

Words near -lock in the dictionary

  1. -ling
  2. -lings
  3. -lite
  4. -lith
  5. -lithic
  6. -lock
  7. -log
  8. -loger
  9. -logia
  10. -logic
  11. -logical

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: -lock (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “-lock.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/-lock. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.