Word.ws English Dictionary

wall time

wall time noun: the actual time of day, as would be seen on a wall clock; contrasted with the (possibly inaccurate) time according to a computer system.

Noun

wall time (uncountable)

  1. The actual time of day, as would be seen on a wall clock; contrasted with the (possibly inaccurate) time according to a computer system.
  2. The actual amount of time taken from the start to the end of an operation, as opposed to CPU time, which only includes the periods of time during which the CPU was processing instructions.
    • Additionally, determining the wall time for specific functions or control structures (e.g. for loops) can help identify the most computationally-intensive portion of your program, and indicate which sections should be optimised if possible.2019, Joshua Izaac, Jingbo Wang, Computational Quantum Mechanics, Springer, →ISBN, page 158

Synonyms of wall time

Origin of wall time

Ellipsis of wall-clock time.

Questions about wall time

What does wall time mean?
Wall time means the actual time of day, as would be seen on a wall clock; contrasted with the (possibly inaccurate) time according to a computer system.
What part of speech is wall time?
Wall time is a noun.

Words near wall time in the dictionary

  1. Wall Streeters
  2. Wall Streetese
  3. Wall Streety
  4. wall table
  5. wall tables
  6. wall time
  7. wall tower
  8. wall towers
  9. wall unit
  10. wall units
  11. wall up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wall 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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