Word.ws English Dictionary

dereferenced

dereferenced is the simple past and past participle of dereference.

Meaning of dereference

Verb

dereference (third-person singular simple present dereferences, present participle dereferencing, simple past and past participle dereferenced)

  1. To access the value or object located in a memory location addressed by a pointer or another value interpreted as such; to access a value being referenced by something else.
    • Attempting to dereference a null pointer often results in a crash.
  2. To operate on the file or directory pointed to by a symbolic link, rather than on the link itself.
    • With the find command, any symbolic links appearing after -follow will be dereferenced.
    Synonyms:
    follow, resolve
  3. To dissolve a symbolic link by replacing it with a copy of its target.

See all 4 meanings of dereference

Questions about dereferenced

What is dereferenced the simple past and past participle of?
Dereferenced is the simple past and past participle of dereference.

Words near dereferenced in the dictionary

  1. derederes
  2. Dereemer
  3. dereferencable
  4. dereference
  5. dereferenceable
  6. dereferenced
  7. dereferencer
  8. dereferencers
  9. dereferences
  10. dereferencing
  11. dereferencings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dereferenced (page history and authors); dereference (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dereferenced.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dereferenced. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.