Word.ws English Dictionary

mutex

/ˈmjuːtɛks/

mutex noun: an object in a program that serves as a lock, used to negotiate mutual exclusion among threads.

Noun

mutex (plural mutexes)

  1. An 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

Verb

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

  1. (transitive) To 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)

Forms of mutex

Noun
pluralmutexes
Verb
third-person singular presentmutexes
present participlemutexing
past participlemutexed
pastmutexed

Origin of mutex

Syllabic abbreviation of mutually exclusive or mutual exclusion.

Words formed from mutex

Questions about mutex

What does mutex mean?
Mutex means an object in a program that serves as a lock, used to negotiate mutual exclusion among threads.
What part of speech is mutex?
Mutex can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce mutex?
Mutex is pronounced /ˈmjuːtɛks/ (UK).
What is the plural of mutex?
The plural of mutex is mutexes.

Words near mutex in the dictionary

  1. mutessarifs
  2. mutest
  3. mutetrahedra
  4. mutetrahedron
  5. mutetrahedrons
  6. mutex
  7. mutexed
  8. mutexes
  9. mutexing
  10. Muth
  11. Muth-labben

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mutex (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-uk-mutex.ogg.

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