Sherlock
name, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 someone who can be employed as a detective to collect information and assist in criminal investigations wordnet
- 1 To deduce. informal
""Anybody could have Sherlocked at a glance," sniffed young Kennilworth, "that it had been packed by a crazy person!""
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of Sherlock. alt-of
- 3 To search. informal
"That afternoon when the boys were in the field Mr. Frickstad sherlocked around in the tents and under the cots looking for a missing rocking-chair."
- 4 To obsolete a unique feature in third-party software by introducing a similar or identical feature to the OS or a first-party program/app. slang
"The thing software developers fear most is being "sherlocked"."
- 1 An English surname transferred from the nickname.
- 2 A male given name transferred from the surname, of rare usage.
- 3 A detective, especially used sarcastically to address somebody who has stated the obvious. humorous
"— Where that arrow on the map says 'You are here', that must be where we are. — Yeah, well done Sherlock."
Example
More examples"Baffled by Sherlock Holmes' cryptic remarks, Watson wondered whether Holmes was intentionally concealing his thoughts about the crime."
Etymology
Supposedly from an Old English scir-locc (“bright-lock”). One of a group of surnames originally denoting hair colour, parallel to Blacklock, Harlock (Old English har (“grey”)), Silverlock. In the sense of “a detective”, from Sherlock Holmes. In the computing verb sense, refers to the software Sherlock, which in 2002 came to replicate some of the features of an earlier complementary program called Watson.
Related phrases
More for "sherlock"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.