lockup

noun lock·up \ ˈläk-ˌəp \

|Updated on: 14 Aug 2018

Examples: lockup in a Sentence

Definition of lockup

1 : jail; especially : a local jail where persons are detained prior to court hearing

2 : an act of locking : the state of being locked

See lockup defined for English-language learners

See lockup defined for kids

Examples of lockup in a Sentence

the firm conviction that juvenile offenders should never be held in adult lockups

Recent Examples of lockup from the Web

County Judge Aurelio Guerra says the new lockup will boost the local economy.

— Fox News, "Immigrant lockup to open on site of destroyed Texas prison," 4 July 2018
President Barack Obama's administration, which saw Guantánamo prison as a recruiting symbol for al-Qaida, sought to shut it down by moving to U.S. lockups the last of the nearly 800 post-9/11 captives seized during the George W. Bush years.

— carol rosenberg, miamiherald, "Blue is the new orange as Guantánamo preps for new prisoners, maybe ISIS fighters," 20 June 2018
What is formally known as the Berks County Residential Center is the oldest and smallest of the three detention facilities, a low-security lockup opened in 2001 in Leesport, about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

— jeff gammage, Philly.com, "Berks family detention center: A model for jailing migrant families?," 28 June 2018
Officials in a remote South Texas county have approved a contract to open a privately run, 1,000-bed immigration lockup on the site of a tent city prison that was destroyed during a 2015 riot.

— Fox News, "Immigrant lockup to open on site of destroyed Texas prison," 4 July 2018
San Francisco’s Log Cabin Ranch — the last resort for the city’s delinquent juveniles, short of a state lockup — has been closed indefinitely following an unprecedented number of teens going AWOL.

— matier & ross, SFChronicle.com, "City closes youth corrections facility — residents keep running away," 27 June 2018
Trump’s new policy, which calls for keeping families together — but in federal lockups for indefinite periods — clearly violates existing court rulings.

— david lauter, latimes.com, "Faced with a political crisis, Trump blinks, but the crisis isn't close to being over," 22 June 2018
To give the standard plug, such lockups allow ruling families to consider the public interest rather than Wall Street when running media companies.

— holman w. jenkins, WSJ, "What CBS’s Boardroom Blood Feud Says About TV," 1 June 2018
The commonwealth is considering offloading some 3,200 prisoners, apparently to privately run lockups across the water, according to the latest fiscal turnaround plan.

— jonathan levin, Bloomberg.com, "Puerto Rico to Offload Inmates to U.S. From ‘Archaic’ Prisons," 13 Apr. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'lockup.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

First Known Use of lockup

1746

in the meaning defined at sense 1

See Words from the same year

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lockup Synonyms

LOCKUP Defined for English Language Learners

lockup

noun

Definition of lockup for English Language Learners

: a place where prisoners are kept
: a garage (sense 1) that is rented out

LOCKUP Defined for Kids

lockup

noun lock·up \ ˈläk-ˌəp \

Definition of lockup for Students

: prison

Law Dictionary

lockup

noun lock·up

legal Definition of lockup

1 : a cell or group of cells (as in a courthouse) or jail where persons are held prior to a court hearing — compare house of correction, house of detention, jail, penitentiary, prison

2 : the tactic of arranging with a friendly party an option to buy a valuable portion of one's corporate assets in order to discourage a takeover by another party