unlock

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for unlock is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʌnˈlɒk/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,374 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for unlock, with forms such as "nulock", "ulnock", and "unlcok". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "unpack", "unlucky", "unlocked", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English unloken, unlouken, onlouken, from Old English onlūcan (“to unlock”), equivalent to un- + lock. Cognate with Dutch ontluiken (“to unlock”). 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 unlock, spelled U-N-L-O-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.