millisecond

noun

mil·​li·​sec·​ond ˈmi-lə-ˌse-kənd 

-kənt

: one thousandth of a second

Did you know?

A millisecond isn't long enough for the blink of an eye, but a few milliseconds may determine the winner of a swim race or a hundred-yard dash. With the ever-increasing speed of modern technology, even a millisecond has started to seem a little sluggish; computer operations are now measured in nanoseconds—that is, billionths of a second.

Examples of millisecond in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Update your profile photo to something current and confident People make snap judgments in milliseconds. —Jodie Cook, Forbes.com, 13 Aug. 2025

This span of time, usually up to few hundreds of milliseconds, is called the temporal window of integration (TWI). —Petar Popovski, IEEE Spectrum, 13 Aug. 2025

Over the course of an hour on Friday afternoon, my home connection averaged 210 Mbps down and 17.2 Mbps up, with an average latency of 23 milliseconds. —Stephen Clark, ArsTechnica, 25 July 2025

July 22 could end up being the shortest of 2025, with Earth's rotation shaving off about 1.34 milliseconds from the usual 86,400 seconds. —Tiffany Acosta, AZCentral.com, 22 July 2025

Word History

Etymology

International Scientific Vocabulary

First Known Use

1909, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for millisecond

• femtosecond
• microsecond
• nanosecond
• picosecond
• beckoned
• reckoned
• second
• seconde

Kids Definition

millisecond

noun

mil·​li·​sec·​ond ˈmil-ə-ˌsek-ənd 

 also  -ənt

: one thousandth of a second

Medical Definition

millisecond

noun

mil·​li·​sec·​ond ˈmil-ə-ˌsek-ənd, -ənt 

: one thousandth of a second

—abbreviation ms, msec