mutex

Etymology

Contraction of mutually exclusive or mutual exclusion.

noun

1. (programming) 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, page 632

verb

1. (programming, 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)