volatile

CEFRC1

/ˈvɒl.əˌtaɪl/

adjective

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

Examples

Reputations are volatile. Loyalties are fickle. Management teams are increasingly disconnected from their staff.
Tom and Mary's relationship was very volatile and they argued constantly.

At a glance

Sits at C1 on the CEFR scale

Also pronounced

Deep Dive

Extra meanings

In context

a volatile man
Now Mr. Bush plans to pour more arms into this unstable region and add fuel to the volatile powderkeg he has foolishly created.
Operations on C++ volatiles do put the compiler on notice that the object may be modified asynchronously, and hence are generally safer to use than ordinary variable accesses.

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Now Mr. Bush plans to pour more arms into this unstable region and add fuel to the volatile powderkeg he has foolishly created.
2007 August 1, “Unwise Arms Deal With Saudi Arabia (2 Letters)”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2022
Its pricing is highly volatile — and therefore highly risky. For all its nosebleed ascents, bitcoin also has had some gut-punching plunges. Between November 2021 and November 2022, for example, the price of bitcoin dropped 75%, from $64,455 to $16,196, according to data on coinmarketcap.com.
2024 November 19, Jeanne Sahadi, “Bitcoin has smashed records. Should you invest?”, in CNN Business, archived from the original on 04 Jun 2025
This method stores a value into a non-volatile field called result, then stores true in the volatile field finished. The main thread waits for the field finished to be set to true, then reads the field result.
2010, Jon Jagger, Nigel Perry, Peter Sestoft, Annotated C# Standard, page 467
Operations on C++ volatiles do put the compiler on notice that the object may be modified asynchronously, and hence are generally safer to use than ordinary variable accesses.
2011, Victor Pankratius, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Walter Tichy, Fundamentals of Multicore Software Development, page 74

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From Middle French volatile, from Latin volātilis (“flying; swift; temporary; volatile”), from volō (“to fly”).