atomic

adj

1. (not-comparable)Of or relating to atoms; composed of atoms; monatomic.

   “A stream of atomic hydrogen is emitted.”

2. (not-comparable)Employing or relating to nuclear energy or processes.

   “atomic energy; atomic bombs”

   “Some nutjob once built a small atomic pile in his back yard.”

   “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.”

3. (broadly, colloquial, not-comparable)Employing or relating to nuclear energy or processes.
4. (not-comparable)Infinitesimally small.

   “The hairs on a dust mite are almost atomic.”

5. (not-comparable)Unable to be split or made any smaller.

   “A bit is an atomic item of data.”

6. (not-comparable)Unable to be split or made any smaller.
7. (not-comparable)Unable to be split or made any smaller.
8. (not-comparable)Unable to be split or made any smaller.
9. (not-comparable)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.”

   “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.”

noun

1. An atomic operation.