Definition of nanosecond
1
: one billionth of a second
2
: a very brief moment
- Trending Now: More Trending:
- asylum insubordinate promulgate epochal clemency
- ALL
What's Trending Now
More Trending Words
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 of nanosecond from the Web
-
No one should have questioned for a nanosecond that this sensitive information would go straight to the White House, anyway.
-
After going normcore for a nanosecond, indulging in some Versace archival moments, and even—gasp!—wearing sweats and leggings, the star pulled out all the stops yesterday with three wardrobe changes.
-
Each level itself has the potential for fierce speedrunning competition — even in the simplest stages, there’s always a way to pick up another piece of gold or shave off another nanosecond.
-
Quickly — in about a nanosecond — four examples came to mind.
-
The tempo was on the luxurious side, and after sitting on the first note for a nanosecond, Nézet-Séguin unfolded the rest of the phrase by turning over notes one by one, looking for meaning.
-
Pure hatred can be delivered directly to your home in a nanosecond.
-
The qubits remain coherent for 100 microseconds at a time, but the entanglement of a qubit pair can be done in about 10 nanoseconds.
-
Using that approach, Cleland and Kevin Satzinger, a UCSB graduate student, fashioned a resonator on a lithium niobate chip that rang for up to 150 nanoseconds.
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.
Did You Know?
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.
Origin and Etymology of nanosecond
International Scientific Vocabulary
NEW! Time Traveler
First Known Use: 1958
in the meaning defined at sense 1
See Words from the same yearNANOSECOND Defined for English Language Learners
Definition of nanosecond for English Language Learners
-
: one billionth of a second
-
: a very short time
Medical Dictionary
medical Definition of nanosecond
: one billionth of a second
—abbreviation ns, nsec
Learn More about nanosecond
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up nanosecond? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).
