Other forms: lockers
A locker is the narrow metal cupboard that is yours for the year: a door, a latch, and a padlock whose code you keep forgetting. Coats and football boots in the school corridor; a wet swimsuit and a pound coin at the pool.
Lockers come in rows, which is why you hear a bank of lockers, and the room they line is the locker room — American English uses that for the team changing room, and locker-room talk for the crude talk inside it. Boats have lockers too: a cupboard or chest built into the hull, and a drowned sailor is said to lie in Davy Jones's locker. At a station a left-luggage locker takes your bag for a few hours. Do not mix locker up with lock: the lock is the fastening, the locker is the whole cupboard it shuts.
1nounlockerA small cupboard with a lock, for keeping your things while you are somewhere else.~98%
“He shoved his coat into his locker and ran for the bell.”
2nounchestA cupboard or chest built into a boat or ship.~2%
“The rope was coiled in a locker under the seat.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
locker is a cupboard.
Locker is simply lock with -er stuck on the end: the thing that has a lock. The same family turns up across the North Sea — German Loch, Dutch luik, and Dutch loket, a hatch or little window.
Middle English
lok
English
lock
English, today
locker
From lock + -er or -er. Related to German Loch, Dutch luik, and Dutch loket. lock comes from Middle English lok. From Middle English lok, from Old English loc, from Proto-West Germanic lok, from Proto-Germanic luką from Proto-Indo-European lewg- (“to bend; turn”). Cognate with cim loch, lòch (“hole”), Dutch lok (“hole”), German Loch (“hole”), German Low German Lock (“hole”), lb Lach (“hole”), wym łöch (“hole”), Yiddish לאָך (“hole”), Danish låg (“lid, cover”), Norwegian Bokmål lokk (“lid, cover”), Norwegian Nynorsk lok, lokk (“lid, cover”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA