dereferencing
dereferencing is the present participle and gerund of dereference.
Meaning of dereference
Verb
dereference (third-person singular simple present dereferences, present participle dereferencing, simple past and past participle dereferenced)
- 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.
- 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.
- To dissolve a symbolic link by replacing it with a copy of its target.
Noun
dereferencing (plural dereferencings)
- The act by which something is dereferenced.
- Linus Torvalds himself designed the sparse tool to find direct userspace pointer dereferencings in the kernel.2010, Wolfgang Mauerer, Professional Linux Kernel Architecture
Forms of dereferencing
| plural | dereferencings |
|---|
Questions about dereferencing
- What does dereferencing mean?
- Dereferencing means the act by which something is dereferenced.
- What is dereferencing the present participle and gerund of?
- Dereferencing is the present participle and gerund of dereference.
- What part of speech is dereferencing?
- Dereferencing is a noun.
- What is the plural of dereferencing?
- The plural of dereferencing is dereferencings.
Words near dereferencing in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dereferencing (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “dereferencing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dereferencing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.