Definition of Multi-threading

Not really programming related this question, but I still hope it fits somehow here :). I wrote the following sentence in my work:

Mulitthreading refers to the ability of an OS to subdivide an application into
threads, where each of the them are capable to execute independently.

I was told, that this definition of thread is too narrow. I am not really sure why this is the case, coul开发者_开发百科d somebody be so kind to explain me what I missed?

Thank you

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Usually, it is the application that decides when to create threads, not the OS. Also, you may want to mention that threads share address space, while each process has its own.

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A thread fundamentally, is a saved execution context - a set of saved registers and a stack, that you can resume and continue execution of. This thread can be executed on a processor (these days, many machines of course can execute multiple threads at the same time).

The critical aspect of "multi-threading" is, that an operating system can emulate execution of many threads at the same time, by preempting (stopping) a thread once it has run for a certain amount of time (a "quantum"), then scheduling another thread to run, based on a certain algorithm that is OS-specific.