Why is Locking of a Method or Block of Code for Thread Safety is called “Synchronized” and not “Lock” or “Locked

When a method or block of code is locked with the reserved “synchronized” key word in Java, the memory (i.e. heap) where the shared data is kept is synchronized.

This means,When a synchronized block or method is entered after the lock has been acquired by a thread, it first reads any changes to the locked object from the main heap memory to ensure that the thread that has the lock has the current info before start executing.

After the synchronized  block has completed and the thread is ready to relinquish the lock, all the changes that were made to the object that was locked is written or flushed back to the main heap memory so that the other threads that acquire the lock next has the current info.

This is why it is called “synchronized” and not “locked”. This is also the reason why the immutable objects are inherently thread-safe and does not require any synchronization. Once created, the immutable objects cannot be modified.