Dock

Dock can refer to several things:

• Places for the transfer of people and materials to, from, or between different forms of transport or working with transport:
  • A maritime dock.
  • Loading dock , the land equivalent.
  • A dry dock.
  • In American English dock is technically synonymous with pier or wharf; any human-made structure intended for people to be on. However, in modern use, pier is generally used to refer to structures originally intended for industrial use, such as seafood processing or shipping, and more recently for cruise ships, and dock is used for most everything else, often with a qualifier, such as ferry dock , swimming dock , etc.
  • Space vehicles also dock in space to allow the transfer of astronauts from one vehicle to another in a space rendezvous.
  • In British courtrooms, it is a small enclosed place where the defendant stands during the trial.

These meanings of the word came from Old Norse dokk = "small recess or corner".

• Plants in the genus Rumex are also often known as Docks.
• Docking, the process of removing part of an animal's tail or ears.
• The Dock in some computer operating systems, especially NeXT Step and Mac OS X