A landlocked country or region sits entirely inside the land: other countries wrap around it, and it has no coast of its own, so no harbour on the open sea. Switzerland and Austria are the classroom examples in Europe; Paraguay and Bolivia in South America. The word is a geography word first, a little formal, and very common in textbooks and news about trade — because with no coast, you must send goods through somebody else's ports. Though actually people stretch it a little: a landlocked lake has no river out to the ocean, and landlocked salmon live in fresh water and never go to sea. The picture is the same: shut in by land. It does not mean the land is locked with a key, or that you are not allowed in. And a country with a coast on an inland sea that never reaches the ocean can still be argued over; the tidy school answer is ‘no coastline on the open sea.’