The location should be locked-off and secured to maintain cleanliness.
I couldn't find the meaning from dictionaries. Does "locked-off" mean "isolated"?
English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityThe location should be locked-off and secured to maintain cleanliness.
I couldn't find the meaning from dictionaries. Does "locked-off" mean "isolated"?
It means something like 'isolated', in the sense of being closed so that nobody can go in. It's an unusual way of expressing this meaning, so I'm not surprised you couldn't find it. I would say it's the result of combining two more standard phrases, in the way that people often do.
The first of the two phrases I'm thinking of is
The location should be locked
which means that access should be forcibly prevented by a mechanical lock on the door. When a location is locked it's not necessarily obvious that it's locked unless you try to get in.
The second phrase that is combined with the first is
The location should be closed off
Which means that it should be designated as inaccessible by some obvious physical means like a barrier or signage, but not necessarily locked. If you combine the two you get
The location should be locked off
So, why did the writer write it in this unusual way? I have some ideas, but I don't know for sure.
The fact that the writer included a third redundant phrase, 'and secured', adds to my suspicion that they weren't confident of being able to express their meaning successfully. They actually used three different ideas that mean roughly the same thing: 'locked', 'closed off' and 'secured'. Any one of them would have been sufficient to express the meaning by itself.