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Lakewood is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The population was 79,345 at the 2000 census. It is bordered by Long Beach on the west and south, Bellflower on the north, Cerritos on the northeast, Cypress on the east, and Hawaiian Gardens on the southeast. Major thoroughfares include Lakewood (SR 19), Bellflower, and Del Amo Boulevards and Carson and South Streets. The San Gabriel River Freeway (I-605) runs through the city's eastern regions.

Sometimes called "an instant city" because of its origins—going from lima bean fields in 1950 to a well-developed city by 1960—Lakewood is, along with Levittown, New York, the archetypal post-World War II American suburb. The vast majority of its housing stock is small, mass-produced single-story houses on tree-lined streets, sold initially to World War II and Korean War veterans who worked in the aerospace factories of Long Beach and the South Bay.

Lakewood's primary thoroughfares are mostly boulevards with landscaped medians, with frontage roads on either side in residential districts. Unlike in most similar configurations, however, access to the main road from the frontage road is only possible from infrequently spaced collector streets. This arrangement, hailed by urban planners of the day, is a compromise between the traditional urban grid and the arrangement of winding "drives" and culs-de-sac that dominates contemporary suburban and exurban design.

Lakewood is credited as a pioneer among California cities in services provision. Although it is an incorporated city, it contracts for most municipal services, with most of these provided by Los Angeles County and, to a lesser extent, by other public agencies and private industry. Lakewood was the first city in the nation to contract for all of its municipal services when Lakewood incorporated as a municipality in 1954, making it the nation's first "contract city." Many other Los Angeles suburbs, such as Cerritos and Diamond Bar have adopted the "Lakewood Plan."

Lakewood is the home of the first Denny's Restaurant. In 1953 Harold Butler founded Danny’s Donuts, which was renamed to Denny's Restaurant in 1959.

Lakewood was named Sports Illustrated's "Sportstown USA" in 2005 for the State of California.