java

Think of it this way, you have 10 cats running around your apartment and don't appreciate the mess they're making so you buy 10 cages. In a proper computing environment these can be thought of as "sandboxes", but for this instance's sake, we'll use them strictly as memory spaces. Each cat has its own memory space where it can live and play. The actions of "playing with yarn", "coughing up a hairball", and "cleaning" are basically threads. When you open Microsoft Word, the functions of "Spell Check", "Load Clip Art", and "Search and Replace" are threads that run inside the process called "WinWord.exe"