Word.ws English Dictionary

reentrant

/ɹiːˈɛntɹənt/

reentrant adjective: designating a structure at an angle pointing inward towards the centre of the fortification; opposed to salient.

Adjective

reentrant (not comparable)

  1. (historical) Designating a structure at an angle pointing inward towards the centre of the fortification; opposed to salient.
  2. Pertaining to an angle pointing inwards, or to a line forming part of such an angle.
    • [T]he eye was enclosed in a six-pointed star, and swords with undulating blades issued from each re-entrant angle.1917, Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, Weiser, published 2010, page 78
  3. Pertaining to a type of angular valley cutting deep into the side of a hill or mountain.
  4. Pertaining to a type of cardiac arrhythmia in which an impulse re-excites an area that has already been stimulated.
  5. Designating a way of tuning the strings of certain stringed instruments, such that they follow a pattern of rising and falling intervals, rather than having successively higher pitches.
  6. That may be executed more than once at a time either by different threads, or because of recursion.
    • Global variables must not be altered by reentrant code.
    • To mitigate that risk, there's an important exception to actor serialization: actors are reentrant. This means that when an actor itself says await, then while the actor's code is waiting, its members can be accessed from outside the actor using await.2021, Matt Neuburg, iOS 15 Programming Fundamentals with Swift, 8th edition, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 386
  7. Designed to return to the Earth's atmosphere.
  8. Such that the corresponding lock can be reacquired by the locking thread.
    • The global interpreter lock of the embedded scripting engine is not reentrant.

Noun

reentrant (plural reentrants)

  1. An angle or part that reenters itself.
  2. One who enters (the labour market, etc.) again.
  3. A valley between a pair of parallel ridges.

Forms of reentrant

Adjective
alternative formre-entrant
alternative formreëntrant
Noun
pluralreentrants

Origin of reentrant

From re- + entrant.

Words formed from reentrant

Questions about reentrant

What does reentrant mean?
Reentrant means designating a structure at an angle pointing inward towards the centre of the fortification; opposed to salient.
What part of speech is reentrant?
Reentrant can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce reentrant?
Reentrant is pronounced /ɹiːˈɛntɹənt/.

Words near reentrant in the dictionary

  1. reentrains
  2. reentrance
  3. reentrances
  4. reentrancies
  5. reentrancy
  6. reentrant
  7. reentrantly
  8. reentrants
  9. reentre
  10. reentred
  11. reentres

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reentrant (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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