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English
Etymology
From atom + -ic.
Pronunciation
Adjective
atomic (not comparable)
- (physics, chemistry) Of or relating to atoms; composed of atoms; monatomic.
- Antonym: molecular
A stream of atomic hydrogen is emitted.
- Employing or relating to nuclear energy or processes.
atomic energy; atomic bombs
Some nutjob once built a small atomic pile in his back yard.
1955, David J. Dallin, Soviet Espionage, page 495:Before the atomic spy Allan Nunn May left Canada to go to London, a treff in London had to be arranged for him and another agent.
- Infinitesimally small.
The hairs on a dust mite are almost atomic.
- Unable to be split or made any smaller.
- Synonyms: indivisible, unatomizable
A bit is an atomic item of data.
- (programming, of a commit in a VCS) Containing a single change, as opposed to involving numerous unrelated changes.
- (logic, of a proposition) Lacking logical operators; unable to be made simpler in logical form.
- (order theory, of a partially ordered set with a least element 0) Such that for every element there exists an atom such that .
- (computing, of an operation) Guaranteed to complete either fully or not at all while waiting in a pause, and running synchronously when called by multiple asynchronous threads.
In order to avoid race conditions, this operation has to be atomic.
Whenever possible, use atomic types instead of mutexes.
2006, Tim Peierls, Brian Goetz, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, Doug Lea, David Holmes, Java Concurrency in Practice, Pearson Education, →ISBN, page 325:It also provides an atomic compareAndSet method (which if successful has the memory effects of both reading and writing a volatile variable) and, for convenience, atomic add, increment, and decrement methods.
Derived terms
Translations
of, or employing nuclear energy or processes
computing: guaranteed to either complete fully, or not at all
Translations to be checked
Noun
atomic (plural atomics)
- (computing) An atomic operation.
Anagrams
Occitan
Pronunciation
Adjective
atomic m (feminine singular atomica, masculine plural atomics, feminine plural atomicas)
- atomic
Romanian
Etymology
Borrowed from French atomique. By surface analysis, atom + -ic.
Adjective
atomic m or n (feminine singular atomică, masculine plural atomici, feminine and neuter plural atomice)
- atomic
Declension