Ward, Lock & Co. was a publishing house in the United Kingdom that started as a partnership and developed until it was eventually absorbed into the publishing combine of Orion Publishing Group.

Ebenezer Ward and George Lock started a publishing concern in 1854 which became known as "Ward and Lock". Based originally in Fleet Street, London it outgrew its offices and in 1878 moved completely to Salisbury Square, London.

The firm's first office was at 158 Fleet Street. Fleet Street had an inviting architecture and atmosphere. It was full of businesses and people, coffee houses, taverns, and soup kitchens. It appealed to "publishers, printers, authors and tradesmen who occupied its houses and frequented its taverns." And it was always bustling with "innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, wagons playhouses".

Before founding Ward and Lock, Ward had worked as the manager of the book department at Herbert Ingram and Company. In 1855, Herbert Ingram and Company folded and Ward and Lock, with some help from their business partners Thomas Dixon Galpin and George William Petter, bought some of Ingram's "publications, including the copyrights, wood-blocks, stereotype plates and engravings [that] were put up for sale." Perhaps, the most important book from the Ingram catalogue was Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, which Ward and Lock started reissuing with great success. By the 1870s, Webster's Dictionary had sold 140,000 copies. Other titles published by Ward and Lock around this time included books on travel, mechanics, and reprints of classical works, such as Homer's Odyssey and Alexandre Dumas' Pictures of Travel in the South of France. By 1861, Ward and Lock had achieved enough success to be able to afford more staff and move into a new office at Amen Corner on Paternoster Row.

When Ward and Lock established their office in Paternoster Row it was already the home of "some of the most famous publishers in the country": Rivington, Longman, William Blackwood and Nelsons were some of the famous publishers with offices in the neighborhood. Ward and Lock continued to publish books at popular prices and started to issue atlases. Some of the authors the company published included Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade and George Augustus Sala. With the help of Ward and Lock, Sala had, in 1860, started a magazine called Temple Bar – a "London magazine for Town and Country Readers". The magazine became very famous and in response to public demand, Ward and Lock published it in volume form, the first volume appearing in 1861.

Charles T. Tyler joined Ward and Lock as a partner in 1865 and the firm became Ward, Lock and Tyler. Tyler seems to have brought capital to the company and was a financial adviser. "Tyler remained with the firm for eight years, ceasing to be a partner in 1873, when it reverted to Ward and Lock."

In 1866, London publisher Samuel Orchart Beeton was obliged (as a result of the financial Panic of 1866) to sell his titles and name to Ward Lock; this gave them the rights to his late wife's Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

In 1870, Ward, Lock and Tyler acquired E. Moxon, Son and Company. Moxon was a publishing firm that had published Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Robert Southey, Benjamin Disraeli and a successful volume of poems illustrated by J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Stothard. The firm was led by Edward Moxon who was an influential poet and publisher, who had died in 1858. By buying the works published by Moxon and Beeton, Ward, Lock and Tyler expanded their connections with many famous poets and authors of the time.