Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Occurring or existing at the same time. synonym: contemporary.
  • adjective Moving or operating at the same rate.
  • adjective Having identical periods.
  • adjective Having identical period and phase.
  • adjective Relating to or being a satellite that orbits a celestial body at a speed that matches the body's rotation, thus remaining stationary as observed from the body's surface.
  • adjective Synchronized by an electronic clock.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Happening at the same time; simultaneous.
  • In electricity, in step with the alternations of the current.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Happening at the same time; simultaneous.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective At the same time, at the same frequency.
  • adjective computing, of communication Single-threaded; blocking; occurring in the same thread as other computations, thereby preventing those computations from resuming until the communication is complete.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective occurring or existing at the same time or having the same period or phase
  • adjective (digital communication) pertaining to a transmission technique that requires a common clock signal (a timing reference) between the communicating devices in order to coordinate their transmissions

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Late Latin synchronus, from Greek sunkhronos : sun-, syn- + khronos, time.]

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Examples

  • Lots of times words get perverted, too -- computer scientists who talk of "synchronous processes" have no idea what the actual definition in English of "synchronous" is -- they think it means "synchronized" -- and when they call putting millions of transistors on a tiny chip and call it Very Large Scale Integration, they're turned the phrase "large scale" on its very head.

    My mechanic Steve 2007

  • Lots of times words get perverted, too -- computer scientists who talk of "synchronous processes" have no idea what the actual definition in English of "synchronous" is -- they think it means "synchronized" -- and when they call putting millions of transistors on a tiny chip and call it Very Large Scale Integration, they're turned the phrase "large scale" on its very head.

    My mechanic Steve 2007

  • What a lot of them didn't realize is that with green threads, if you call a synchronous networking API, you're blocking all your threads, not just one of them.

    Planet Python 2009

  • I wrote it early in 1945 and it was published in Wireless World in October, just after the war had ended, and it laid down the principles which now determine the world's communication system, the idea that you'd have satellites poised at such a height above the earth that they remained stationery in the sky and so-called synchronous, or geostationary, orbit.

    Great voices of science fiction 2011

  • This is why the motor is called a synchronous motor.

    4. Synchronous machines Hans-Friedrich Hoyer 1991

  • However, this tillering is non-synchronous, that is, tillering development lags behind that of the main stem.

    Chapter 7 1981

  • Since the other types of execution rely on calling the synchronous

    Site Home Glenn Gailey [MSFT] 2012

  • The double treatment, known as synchronous chemoradiation, could also save lives among people with breast cancer, a disease that currently kills 425,000 women a year worldwide, according to the British experts who conducted a major scientific study.

    Reuters: Press Release 2011

  • We might even be able to chat about the same song as we listen, which we've termed "synchronous group listening," and which is already

    Gizmodo Eliot Van Buskirk - Evolver 2011

  • The only problem is that it uses a callback .. google. language.translate (str, "en", "nl", function (result) {if (! result. error) {return result. translation;}}); to be able to do something like: (This is called synchronous, right?)

    WebDeveloper.com 2010

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