mutex

Meanings

nounmutex (plural mutexes)

computingAn object in a program that serves as a lock, used to negotiate mutual exclusion among threads.
The ability to set a maximum waiting time provides another reason why in some circumstances, you might prefer to use a mutex rather than a lock statement.
2004, Mark Schmidt, Simon Robinson, Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003, Sams Publishing, →ISBN, page 632

verbmutex (third-person singular simple present mutexes, present participle mutexing, simple past and past participle mutexed)

present singular third person mutexes · participle present mutexing · participle past mutexed · past mutexed

transitivecomputingTo apply a mutex to.
Or you can have a single pipe that is mutexed so each thread can only write to the pipe exclusively. Alternatively, you can have each thread put the finished fd in a globally mutexed list.
2002, Steve Connet, “Re: best way to interrupt a select() call in a (POSIX) thread?”, in comp.programming.threads (Usenet)

Also see

Finnish mutex, muteksi

French mutex, exclusion mutuelle

German Mutex, wechselseitiger Ausschluss

Cite this entry

APA

mutex. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/mutex

MLA

“mutex.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/mutex. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “mutex,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/mutex.

Source: mutex on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.