jiffy
Syllables: jif·fyUK/ˈd͡ʒɪ.fi/
jiffy noun: a very short, unspecified length of time. Also the ellipsis of jiffy bag.
Noun (1)
jiffy (plural jiffies)
- A very short, unspecified length of time.
- I’ll be back in a jiffy.
- Most of the limbs of the law do every thing in a jiffy; but ask what they mean, and they would be as much puzzled, as if you required of them the explanantion of a common act of parliament.1780 February, The Town and Country Magazine, volume 12, page 88
- Synonyms:
- instant, jiff, mo, sec, tick, bat of an eye, bit, blink of an eye, crack, eyeblink
- A unit of time defined by the frequency of its basic timer – historically, and by convention, 0.01 of a second, but some computer operating systems use other values.
- The FOR...NEXT loop for TIME increments by STEP 2 (every two jiffies) for two reasons: 1) the printing of 60 jiffies a second is too fast to read, and 2) the printing of each jiffy takes longer than its incrementations; this would delay the loop, so the printing of TIME$ is slower than it should be.1980, Carroll S. Donahue, Janice K. Enger, PET-CBM Personal Computer Guide, Berkeley, Calif.: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, →OCLC, page 283
- The number of processed packets per round is limited in dependence of the page size. The processed packets are forwarded to a single queue and are processed for the time of two jiffies.2015, Johanna Ullrich, Edgar R. Weippl, “Protection through Isolation: Virtues and Pitfalls”, in Ryan Ko, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, editors, The Cloud Security Ecosystem: Technical, Legal, Business and...
- The length of an alternating current power cycle (1/60 or 1/50 of a second).
- The time taken for light to travel a specified distance in a vacuum, usually one centimetre (approximately 33.3564 picoseconds), but sometimes one foot or the width of a nucleon.
Noun (2) capitalized: Jiffy
Jiffy (plural Jiffies)
- Alternative form of Jiffy bag.
Also used as
jiffy is also the ellipsis of jiffy bag.
jiffy meaning in Hindi and Arabic
jiffy in Hindi
- very short, unspecified length of time
- पल pal
jiffy in Arabic
- very short, unspecified length of time
- وَهْلة wahla, لَحْظة laḥẓa
Examples of jiffy in a sentence
- Here Godfroy nodded pleasantly to Claude, who bowed, and was off— / —In a jiffy* to his men, who greeted him with loud hurrahs.1864, Ulric De Lazie [pseudonym?; copyright entered by Edmund D. Griffin], Dreams within Dreams; a Plagiarism of the Seventeenth Century...
- Then, for a jiffy, I hung on and fought for breath.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC, page 166:
Synonyms of jiffy
24 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of jiffy
| plural | jiffies |
|---|---|
| plural | Jiffies |
| alternative form (obsolete) | giffy |
Origin of jiffy
Origin unknown; said to have been thieves’ cant for “lightning”. Also formerly written "giffy", to which a connection with gliff has been proposed. As a kind of envelope, a genericization of Jiffy bag.
Words formed from jiffy
Phrases with jiffy
Words that rhyme with jiffy
1 more rhymesFewer rhymes
Questions about jiffy
- What does jiffy mean?
- Jiffy means a very short, unspecified length of time.
- What is jiffy in Hindi?
- Jiffy in Hindi is पल (pal). See Jiffy meaning in Hindi.
- How do you use jiffy in a sentence?
- Here Godfroy nodded pleasantly to Claude, who bowed, and was off— / —In a jiffy* to his men, who greeted him with loud hurrahs.
- What part of speech is jiffy?
- Jiffy is a noun.
- How do you pronounce jiffy?
- Jiffy is pronounced /ˈd͡ʒɪ.fi/ (UK).
- What is the plural of jiffy?
- The plural of jiffy is jiffies.
Words near jiffy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: jiffy (page history and authors); Jiffy (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-jiffy.ogg.
Cite this entry: “jiffy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jiffy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.