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airlock

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,980 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: airlocks

An airlock is a sealed chamber between areas of different air pressure. Go through the airlock.

Only one door opens at a time, which is what keeps the two sides separate. In plumbing an airlock is a bubble that stops water flowing, which is a quite different problem.

NASA · Public domain

Definitions of airlock

  1. 1nounairlockA sealed chamber between areas of different air pressure.B2+

    “The airlock took four minutes to cycle each time.”

airlock is a chamber.

Where it comes from

Air plus lock, on the pattern of a canal lock, which does the same job with water.

From air + lock.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

airlock in the wild

  • The Vostok-based Voskhod 3KD spacecraft with two crew members on board, Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov, was equipped with an inflatable airlock.

    Voskhod 2

  • An airlock consists of a chamber with two airtight doors or openings, usually arranged in series, which do not open simultaneously.

    Airlock

  • An airlock may also be used underwater to allow passage between the air environment in a pressure vessel, such as a submarine, and the water environment outside.

    Airlock

  • The Quest Joint Airlock is the primary airlock for the International Space Station.

    Quest Joint Airlock

  • The airlock was launched on STS-104 on July 14, 2001.

    Quest Joint Airlock

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.