LEAPSECOND

Leap second

A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth's rate of rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 25 such leap seconds have been inserted. The most recent one happened on June 30, 2012 at 23:59:60 UTC.

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leap second

Noun

  1. A second of time added to the year occasionally to compensate for variation in the rate of Earth's rotation relative to the absolute standards of time.


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

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