Definition of NANOSECOND

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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

It happens in less than a nanosecond. a nanosecond was about all that it took her to accept his marriage proposal

Recent Examples on the Web

This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. — John Timmer, Ars Technica, "Researchers make RAM from a phase change we don’t entirely understand," 18 Dec. 2018 Yet again, a few nanoseconds of speculation can occur between making an invalid access (accessing memory with a mismatched protection key) and the processor reporting the error, enabling information that should be protected to leak. — Peter Bright, Ars Technica, "Spectre, Meltdown researchers unveil 7 more speculative execution attacks," 14 Nov. 2018 Computing takes nanoseconds; biology takes days, weeks, even years. — Andy Kessler, WSJ, "The Chip That Changed the World," 26 Aug. 2018 Hands were suspended in the air after each piece, dropping for the next work after a nanosecond, preventing applause and creating two seamless program halves. — Peter Dobrin, Philly.com, "Pianist András Schiff is a master of detail at the Kimmel," 1 Apr. 2018 Those pulses have to be generated by something, and a good signal generator might update its output every nanosecond. — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, "New form of qubit control may yield longer computation times," 25 Jan. 2018 Even if the differences cancel each other out on the scale of seconds or minutes, small fluctuations could make the clock less effective on a millisecond or nanosecond scale. — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, "Here Is the World's Most Stable Atomic Clock," 28 Nov. 2016 Ytterbium is highly stable, so ytterbium atomic clocks are accurate past the nanosecond scale, all the way to the picosecond and femtosecond scale (1/1,000,000,000,000,000th of a second). — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, "Here Is the World's Most Stable Atomic Clock," 28 Nov. 2016 Being able to trade at the nanosecond level is vital to Nasdaq. — John Markoff, New York Times, "Time Split to the Nanosecond Is Precisely What Wall Street Wants," 29 June 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'nanosecond.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.