Word.ws English Dictionary

lock-ins

lock-ins is the plural of lock-in.

Meaning of lock-in

Noun

lock-in (plural lock-ins)

  1. (US) A sleepover party, usually held in a public place such as a church or school, in which the participants are not allowed to leave until the next morning.
    • The youth group will have their annual lock-in this weekend.
    Synonyms:
    wakeover
  2. (Ireland, UK) An illegal but widely-tolerated invitation-only gathering in a pub, after the end of licensing hours, to allow regular customers the opportunity to enjoy further drinking time.
    • He was a lunatic drunk and started sing songs that lasted into the early hours of the morning and resulted in many weekend lock-ins in the village pub.2009, Annette J. Dunlea, Always and Forever, page 53
  3. A situation in which a business has adopted a certain standard or product from a specific manufacturer and integrated it into their process, thus making it very costly to change to a different standard or supplier.
    • vendor lock-in
  4. The situation where an investor cannot trade without incurring an undesirable penalty such as taxation.

Questions about lock-ins

What is lock-ins the plural of?
Lock-ins is the plural of lock-in.

Words near lock-ins in the dictionary

  1. lock, stock and barrel
  2. lock-down
  3. lock-downs
  4. lock-free
  5. lock-in
  6. lock-ins
  7. lock-off
  8. lock-offs
  9. lock-on
  10. lock-ons
  11. lock-out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lock-ins (page history and authors); lock-in (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-ins.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lock-ins. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.