A Jiffy

I'm sure you've heard the term "I'll be back in a jiffy", or taken your car into a Jiffy Lube. The term "jiffy" is an odd word that is hard to define just based on looking at it, but the word has been around for awhile, and its exact origins are a mystery. However, in both the phrase from above and the oil change company, the word "jiffy" implies quick or fast, as in "I'll be back very quickly" or fast oil change.

The word jiffy was used a long time ago, and is thought to be a slang word for thieves for lightning (which is very fast, as you know). Gilbert Newton Lewis began using the word as a technical term by the early part of the 20th century. He proposed that a jiffy was 33.3564 picoseconds (1 picosecond is 1 trillionth of a second, or another definition: 1 picosecond is to 1 second as 1 second is to 31,700 years) or the time it takes for light to travel 1 centimeter. Jiffy also found usage in electronics, with its definition being the time between alternating current power cycles (around 1/50 or 1/60 of a second). In computing, a jiffy is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt, but this is far from being an absolute measurement since it depends on the clock interrupt frequency of the hardware platform. In physics and many times in chemistry, a jiffy is simply defined as the time it takes light to travel a particular distance. Edward R. Harrison began using a jiffy in astrophysics and quantum physics to explain the amount of time it takes light to travel 1 fermi (which is the size of a nucleon in an atom).

There are other definitions, most of which are not commonly accepted, but basically, a jiffy a very short amount of time. Anything less than a second is really too short for the average person to dwell on, but for the scientists out there, a trillionth of a second or 1/60 of a second can be an extremely long amount of time. So when you say jiffy from now on, now you know that it's used as a measurement of time/distance.

Bet you didn't know that!