Word.ws English Dictionary

dead time

dead time is the alternative form of deadtime.

Meaning of deadtime

Noun

deadtime (countable and uncountable, plural deadtimes)

  1. The time between a change in a signal and the response to that change.
  2. The time, after an event, during which a system cannot respond to a second event.
  3. (slang, uncountable) The serving of a prison sentence.
    • And I'll tell you something else, if you weren't a cop, I'd have you doin’ dead-time at Leavenworth, for life!1994, Danilo Bach, Daniel Petrie Jr, Steven E. de Souza, Beverly Hills Cop III, spoken by Steve Fulbright (Stephen McHattie)

Forms of dead time

pluraldead times

Questions about dead time

What is dead time the alternative form of?
Dead time is the alternative form of deadtime.

Words near dead time in the dictionary

  1. dead stock
  2. dead stocks
  3. dead stop
  4. dead stops
  5. dead tail
  6. dead time
  7. dead times
  8. dead tired
  9. dead to rights
  10. dead to the world
  11. dead tree

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead time (page history and authors); deadtime (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dead time.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_time. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.