the declaration of a method, field, or inner class; protected members can only be accessed by members of their own class, that class's subclasses or classes from the same package. public The public keyword is used in the declaration of a class, method, or field; public classes, methods, and fields can be accessed by the members of any class. return Used to finish the execution of a method. It can be followed by a value required by the method definition that is returned to the caller short The short keyword is used to declare a field that can hold a 16-bit signed two's complement integer. This keyword is also used to declare that a method returns a value of the primitive type short. static Used to declare a field, method, or inner class as a class field. Classes maintain one copy of class fields regardless of how many instances exist of that class. static also is used to define a method as a class method. Class methods are bound to the class instead of to a specific instance, and can only operate on class fields. Classes and interfaces declared as static members of another class or interface are actually top-level classes and are not inner classes. super Inheritance basically used to achieve dynamic binding or run-time polymorphism in java. Used to access members of a class inherited by the class in which it appears. Allows a subclass to access overridden methods and hidden members of its superclass. The super keyword is also used to forward a call from a constructor to a constructor in the superclass. Also used to specify a lower bound on a type parameter in Generics. switch The switch keyword is used in conjunction with case and default to create a switch statement, which evaluates a variable, matches its value to a specific case, and executes the block of statements associated with that case. If no case matches the value, the optional block labelled by default is executed, if included. synchronized Used in the declaration of a method or code block to acquire the mutex lock for an object while the current thread executes the code. For static methods, the object locked is the class's Class. Guarantees that at most one thread at a time operating on the same object executes that code. The mutex lock is automatically released when execution exits the synchronized code. Fields, classes