read-only
adjective
computers
: capable of being viewed but not of being changed or deleted
a read-only file/document
Examples of read-only in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
Restricting agents to read-only access does not work because the most useful agentic work requires write access and businesses will accept the risk to capture the productivity.
—
Shreyans Mehta, Forbes.com, 28 May 2026
How to Describe the World with a Computer The computer onboard Apollo 11’s lunar module had about a mere 74 kilobytes of storage in the form of read-only memory (ROM).
—Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 12 May 2026
The exploit uses splice() to plant a reference to a read-only page-cache page (for example, /etc/passwd or /usr/bin/su) into the frag slot of a sender-side skb.
—Dan Goodin, ArsTechnica, 11 May 2026
The manufacturer of your phone puts a cryptographic key on the phone, the public read-only key.
—Scott Gilbertson, Wired News, 14 Feb. 2026
One approach is to put the firmware that implements the Root of Trust into read-only memory that can’t be modified once the device is manufactured.
—Guy Fedorkow, IEEE Spectrum, 2 June 2025
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Shreyans Mehta, Forbes.com, 28 May 2026
How to Describe the World with a Computer The computer onboard Apollo 11’s lunar module had about a mere 74 kilobytes of storage in the form of read-only memory (ROM).
—Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 12 May 2026
The exploit uses splice() to plant a reference to a read-only page-cache page (for example, /etc/passwd or /usr/bin/su) into the frag slot of a sender-side skb.
—Dan Goodin, ArsTechnica, 11 May 2026
The manufacturer of your phone puts a cryptographic key on the phone, the public read-only key.
—Scott Gilbertson, Wired News, 14 Feb. 2026
One approach is to put the firmware that implements the Root of Trust into read-only memory that can’t be modified once the device is manufactured.
—Guy Fedorkow, IEEE Spectrum, 2 June 2025
Cite this Entry
“Read-only.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/read-only. Accessed 6 Jun. 2026.
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