JIFFY

Jiffy

Jiffy is an informal term for any unspecified short period of time, as in "I'll be back in a jiffy". From this it has acquired a number of more precise applications for short, very short, or extremely short periods of time. First attested in 1785, the word's origin is unclear, though one suggestion is that it was thieves' cant for lightning.

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jiffy

Noun

  1. A very short, unspecified length of time.
  2. A unit of time defined by the frequency of its basic timer; historically, and by convention, 0.01 seconds, but some operating systems use other values.
  3. The time between alternating current power cycles (1/60 or 1/50 of a second)
  4. The time taken for light to travel one centimetre in a vacuum (sometimes one foot, or sometimes the width of a nucleon)


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: jiffy
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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