jiffy

noun

1. 1

   A 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 hany, and doesn't know vot conweyancing‖ [footnote: ‖ Picking pockets, stealing.] is: d' ye 'ear that?"

   Old Applegate, in the stern, just set and looked at me, and Lord James, amidship, waved both arms and kept hollering for help. I took a couple of everlasting big strokes and managed to grab hold of the skiff's rail, close to the stern. Then, for a jiffy, I hung on and fought for breath.

2. 2

   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 its incrementations; this would delay the loop, so the printing of TIME$ is slower than it should be.

   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.

3. 3

   The length of an alternating current power cycle (1/60 or 1/50 of a second).

4. 4

   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.

5. 5

   Variant of jiffy bagEllipsis of jiffy bag, a padded envelope.

Forms

plural

jiffies