locking

Etymology

verb

1. present participle and gerund of lock

noun

1. The act by which something is locked.
   On the other hand, it was just as probable that these comings and goings, these lockings and unlockings, might be attributable to the existence of some private responsibility, which had unexpectedly intruded itself into the old man's easy existence […] 1862, Wilkie Collins, No Name
2. (computing) The use of a lock or a mutex to restrict access to a part of the code to at most one process.