The term “mutually exclusive” means that the things referred to are related in such a way that each of them excludes or precludes the other, or that those things are incompatible with one another. For instance, when two travel routes are mutually exclusive, it means that a traveler taking one of the routes will not pass or traverse any point of the other route—in other words, there will be no places where the two routes will meet or intersect. Here’s an example, “The London-New York shipping route and the Tokyo-Los Angeles shipping route are mutually exclusive; the first traverses the Atlantic Ocean and the other, the Pacific Ocean.”
Another sense of “mutually exclusive” is that two or more things, conditions, or situations cannot be true at the same time or cannot exist together. In the real world, however, it’s extremely rare for things to be truly mutually exclusive in this particular sense, so the term is actually much more often used in the negative, as in “The profit motive and corporate social responsibility are not mutually exclusive; an enlightened company can pursue both to prosper and gain the abiding support of the communities where it operates.”
