At the recreation center where I go swimming, they have lockers, but they advise you to bring your own padlock. So I bring along a cheap combination lock, which not only lets me secure my precious personal goods, but got me wondering about the words padlock and about lock generally.
What is a padlock, anyway? Various dictionaries tell me that a padlock is a) detachable from the thing you’re locking and b) has a shackle (or “hook”). No surprise here; if you said “padlock” to me, that’s what I’d envision, whether the lock has a key or it’s a combination lock.
But how does the pad- part of padlock fit into this? This is another one of those “origin obscure” deals, but there’s a suggestion that pad or ped is an old dialectical term for a hamper with a lid. So a padlock might originally have been a little lock for locking your picnic or your mess of fish or whatever. Maybe.
From our modern perspective, though, the pad- part of padlock doesn’t carry this sense. Instead, it’s an example of a cranberry morpheme—the sole purpose of the pad- part of the word is that it distinguishes a padlock from other kinds of locks, like a knob lock or a mortise lock or a deadbolt. (For a nice list of lock types, with pictures, see the SecuritySnobs.com site.) You can’t attach the pad- part to other words and thereby transfer the meaning of “detachable” or “hooked.” The pad- morpheme just doesn’t mean anything in this context.
Cranberry morphemes got that name because in the word cranberry, the cran- part doesn’t really mean anything; it just distinguishes a cranberry from, say, a blueberry. (Or anyway, that was the case until a marketing genius at the Ocean Spray company invented Cran-Apple juice, and from there, all sorts of other cran- things, like crantinis.)
Since I was thinking about locks, I looked up what I’ve sometimes seen called a Yale lock. More formally, this is a pin-and-tumbler lock, the kind of lock that you likely have (or have had) for your front door. The term Yale lock, it turns out, is a trademark, owned by the Yale company (originally the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company) that was co-founded by Linus Yale, Jr., the inventor of the pin-and-tumbler lock.
And speaking of deadbolts, as I sort of was earlier, what makes a deadbolt dead? It turns out that a lot of types of locks use springs for their latches, and one way to defeat the lock is to manipulate the spring-loaded latch. But a deadbolt doesn’t have a spring or a latch, so it’s a bolt that can’t be moved: it’s “dead.”
Is the lock of a padlock related to the lock in old weapons like the matchlock, wheellock, and flintlock? Kind of. Those old weapons had a device where a spark was used to ignite the gunpowder that drove the ball—the spark was, as the various names suggest, created by a match, or by a wheel and friction, or by a flint. The mechanism was “probably so called for its resemblance to a door-latching device” (per Douglas Harper), and that sense of lock is where we get the phrase lock, stock, and barrel to mean “everything”—that list constitutes the complete set of parts for one of those old weapons.
What about a relationship between the lock of padlock and a lock of hair (including forelock, earlock, and dreadlocks)? No. The padlock-type lock goes back to an old Germanic verb that meant “enclose, hem in”; the lock of hair goes back to an equally old Germanic root that, among other things, came to mean “loop, noose.” The word lock is also not related to the word latch, which somehow felt like it should be a cousin, but no, latch is from a different verb in Old English.
But wait, there are still more locks! A warlock has nothing to do with either fasteners or hair. The war part goes back to Old English waer, meaning “true,” and to the verb leogan, “to lie, to speak falsely.” So a warlock was a truth-denier or oath-breaker or deceiver. (It’s not entirely clear how the second part of the word happened to end up with -ck at the end.)
And then there’s the hemlock plant, but that seems to consist of a root hym or hem, which might have meant “poison.” The word appears as hymlic or hemlic in Old English (and only in Old English, no cognates in other languages), with variants hemeluc, humbloks, hemblock, and others. The -lock ending on hemlock, it seems, just coincidentally resembles all our other locks.
Finally, there’s wedlock. You’d think that this would be a metaphoric sense of locking something up. But the -lock part of wedlock goes back to a suffix -lac in Old English that was used for “forming nouns of action” (OED). The wed- part meant “pledge,” so wedlock was the act of pledging—like making a wedding vow. The word changed to mean “state of being married” over time, and the ending evolved to -lock, perhaps because it just made sense to associate the state of matrimony with a sort of locking. (Changing a word to conform more closely to a familiar idea is an example of a folk etymology.)
Ok, I guess we now have a lock (haha) on the many senses of lock. Unless you unlock some additional ones for me to explore!
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
I’m so disappointed that lock of wedlock didn’t turn out to come from noose, or at least the latch :))