locking

Plurallockings

1. 1
   noun

   Gerund of lock.

   The locking of the vault is timed to happen automatically at closing.

   Careful locking of every exit is part of the nightly routine.

   Note

   Built from lock plus -ing, this noun behaves like any other. It takes an article and an of-phrase (the locking of the vault), and it can even be counted, with the plural lockings. It shares its spelling with the present participle. The quick test is whether 'the' or a possessive can stand in front of it. The act it names is fastening something shut, not anything to do with a canal lock or a gun's firing mechanism.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of lock.

   The guard is locking each entrance before midnight.

   While locking the car, she dropped her keys on the driveway.

   Note

   Here the -ing form is still a verb, and it brings every use of lock with it. It can be transitive (locking the car) or intransitive (the wheels are locking). It also carries the canal-builder's sense of furnishing a waterway with locks. After be it forms the progressive, and on its own it opens a clause, as in 'while locking the door'. A direct object marks it as a verb rather than the noun for the act.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The use of a lock or a mutex to restrict access to a section of code to at most one process at a time.

   The database relies on locking to ensure only one transaction modifies a row at a time.

   Fine-grained locking improves concurrency by guarding small sections of code separately.

   Note

   A programmer's word, naming a technique for guarding shared code rather than one act of fastening. The lock here is a token rather than a bolt: a mutex that a process must hold before it enters the guarded section and must release when it leaves. The cost is waiting. While one process holds the lock, the others queue behind it, so designers weigh how much code each lock should cover.

Showing meanings only. Show all 3