/ˈd͡ʒɪ.fi/
OriginOrigin unknown; said to have been thieves’ cant for “lightning”. Also formerly written "giffy", to which a connection with gliff has been proposed. As a kind of envelope, a genericization of Jiffy bag.
- colloquialA very short, unspecified length of time.
“I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
“Most of the limbs of the law do every thing in a jiffy; but ask what they mean, and they would be as much puzzled, as if you required of them the explanantion of a common act of parliament.”
“"Who says I filched a vipe?" demanded the indignant thief. "Say it agin', and I'll wisit your wittualling hoffice§ [footnote: § The Mouth.] in two jiffies, my queer von! I'se as 'onest a k'racter as h”
- A unit of time defined by the frequency of its basic timer – historically, and by convention, 0.01 of a second, but some computer operating systems use other values.
“The FOR...NEXT loop for TIME increments by STEP 2 (every two jiffies) for two reasons: 1) the printing of 60 jiffies a second is too fast to read, and 2) the printing of each jiffy takes longer than i”
“The number of processed packets per round is limited in dependence of the page size. The processed packets are forwarded to a single queue and are processed for the time of two jiffies.”
- The length of an alternating current power cycle (1/60 or 1/50 of a second).
- The time taken for light to travel a specified distance in a vacuum, usually one centimetre (approximately 33.3564 picoseconds), but sometimes one foot or the width of a nucleon.
- UK, abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsisEllipsis of jiffy bag, a padded envelope.
Formsjiffies(plural) · giffy(alternative, obsolete)