the.com/jiffy
A real unit of time so fast light barely crosses an atom before it ends.
means A jiffy is an informal word for a very short, unspecified moment of time, as in 'I'll be back in a jiffy.'
from The word surfaced in 18th-century English slang, and its true source is unknown — it appears already meaning 'a flash, an instant.' One popular guess ties it to thieves' cant, another to a dialect word for lightning, but neither is proven; honestly, it just arrived sounding fast. Later, scientists playfully borrowed the casual word and pinned it to precise physical durations, which is how a vague slang for 'a sec' ended up as a real unit of time.
- actual measurement
- In physics, about one ten-trillionth of a second
- computing jiffy
- One tick of a system clock, often 10ms
- peanut imposter
- The famous peanut butter is Jif, no y
- electrical origin
- Defined as time for light to travel one centimeter
- chemist's coinage
- Gilbert Newton Lewis named the atomic version
jiffy lube — quick-lube service chain founded 1979, performs oil changes in under 30 minutes
jiffy peanut butter — j.m. smucker company brand, top-selling peanut butter in the united states