padlock

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for padlock is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpæ̞dˌlɒk/. Corpus data places it at rank #42,806 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A detachable lock that can be used to secure something by means of a sliding or hinged shackle".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for padlock, with forms such as "apdlock", "paddlock", and "padlcok". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "pollock", "paddock", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From earlier pad lock (19th c.); Middle English padlock, padlokke, from pad-, of unknown origin, + lok (“lock”). Perhaps originally a lock for a pad (“gate”), or a gate opening to a path, or a lock for a basket or pannier, from UK dialect pad (“a pannier”). Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is padlock, spelled P-A-D-L-O-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.