Word.ws English Dictionary

deep time

deep time noun: time that is considered on the vast scale of geology or the universe, rather than on the scale of human history.

Noun

deep time (uncountable)

  1. Time that is considered on the vast scale of geology or the universe, rather than on the scale of human history.
    • Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis.1981, John McPhee, Basin and Range, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, →ISBN, page 20
    • Yet deep time seemed impervious to the methods of conventional history writing, a state of affairs captured in the word coined to describe this newly remote past: prehistory.2011, Andrew Shryock, Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, University of California Press, →ISBN, page x
  2. Time that is set in the very distant past or far into the future.

Examples of deep time in a sentence

  • The organization of deep time was the special mission of geology, and it set about chronicling rocks into a temporal stratigraphy.2012, Lydia Pyne, Stephen J. Pyne, “Eiszeit and Zeitgeist”, in The Last Lost World, Penguin, →ISBN:
  • The affective register of deep time was one of terror and wonder, fashioned to fit a vision of the sublime that transcended and yet somehow affirmed humanity.2016 October 31, David Farrier, “How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing”, in The Atlantic:
  • Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans – some fleeting, some cosmic – drift in and out of view.2022 December 15, Samanth Subramanian, “Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site”, in The Guardian:

Origin of deep time

Coined by American writer John McPhee in 1981.

Questions about deep time

What does deep time mean?
Deep time means time that is considered on the vast scale of geology or the universe, rather than on the scale of human history.
How do you use deep time in a sentence?
The organization of deep time was the special mission of geology, and it set about chronicling rocks into a temporal stratigraphy.
What part of speech is deep time?
Deep time is a noun.

Words near deep time in the dictionary

  1. deep thinkers
  2. deep throat
  3. deep throated
  4. deep throating
  5. deep throats
  6. deep time
  7. deep tissue
  8. deep tissues
  9. deep underground military base
  10. deep underground military bases
  11. deep vein

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: deep time (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: “deep time.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/deep_time. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.