jiffy

noun

1. (colloquial)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?"”

   “Here Godfroy nodded pleasantly to Claude, who bowed, and was off— / —In a jiffy* to his men, who greeted him with loud hurrahs. In another jiffy, he was on a barrel, making them an oration. In another jiffy, he had hold of a horse, somehow—for the man had contrived already to make himself so popular in Viot, that he could have anything he liked for the asking. [Footnote: * Jiffy.—Let not the reader scorn the word; it is in Webster. "Jiffy, a moment."—Webster.]”

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. The length of an alternating current power cycle (1/60 or 1/50 of a second).
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. (UK, abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis)Ellipsis of jiffy bag, a padded envelope.
6. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative form of Jiffy bag.