Origin of thread join

Question

Nearly all programming languages that support threading, have a method called join. I understand what a join does, but would like to know what the origin behind the naming of it is? Wouldn't a name such as finish be more appropriate?

Answer 1

I think it comes from the analogy of execution paths. The program's execution path split into two separate paths when the thread was spawned, and now you want the two paths to join back together into a single path again.