nanosecond
noun
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The nonserious use of nanosecond is probably much more common than the proper technical use. In measurement terms such as nanosecond, nanogram, and nanometer, nano- means "billionth;" in other kinds of words, its meaning isn't quite so precise. In computers, the speed of reading and writing to random access memory (RAM) is measured in nanoseconds. By comparison, the speed of reading or writing to a hard drive or a CD-ROM player, or for information to travel over the Internet, is measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second), which are a million times longer than nanoseconds.
Examples of nanosecond in a Sentence
Michael Ashley, Forbes.com, 3 June 2025
Suddenly, hearsay, whether or not grounded in fact, could be amplified to the rest of the world in a nanosecond, with fact-finding considered secondary or not at all.
—Chicago Tribune, 30 May 2025
Sizes and colors are limited, so don’t leave them in your cart for a nanosecond longer than necessary.
—Katie Jackson, Travel + Leisure, 25 May 2025
Even a briefcase-size model could generate EM fields with peaks in the thousands of volts per meter, and those peaks would come fast and short, with a rise time of about 100 picoseconds and a pulse width of about 1 nanosecond.
—IEEE Spectrum, 25 Aug. 2014
See All Example Sentences for nanosecond
Cite this Entry
“Nanosecond.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nanosecond. Accessed 8 Jul. 2025.
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nanosecond
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nanosecond
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