The operator used to allocate a new object in Java is new. It is used in expressions such as new Person() or new ArrayList<>(), where Java creates an instance of a class or an array and invokes the appropriate constructor.
The new expression combines object creation with initialization. After the runtime obtains storage for the object, Java initializes its fields to default values, then runs the selected constructor. The resulting reference can be assigned to a variable, passed to a method, or used directly in another expression.
A frequent mix-up is confusing new with constructor names or methods such as init, alloc, and create. Those names may appear in other languages or programming frameworks, but they are not Java’s object-creation operator. Java also has no delete operator: objects that are no longer reachable are reclaimed automatically by the garbage collector.
The same keyword can create arrays, as in new int[10]. That allocates an array of ten integers, whose elements initially contain zero values.