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A thread of control in a program.

Each thread:

• Starts at some predefined location
• Executes in its own context, independent of other threads in the program
• May choose to cooperate with one or more threads in the program
• Appears to have a degree of simultaneous execution (in the case of multiple CPUs, may actually execute simultaneously with other threads in the program)

Java has a class, Thread, which provides an abstraction to support the concept of a thread within a Java Virtual Machine. It, together with other Java features, provides the necessary functionality and context to allow Java programmers to write multithreaded programs.