Noun

(jiffies)

(colloquial) A very short, unspecified length of time.

* , chapter=7

, title= Mr. Pratt's Patients , passage=Old Applegate, in the stern, just set and looked at me, and Lord James, amidship, waved both arms and kept hollering for help. I took a couple of everlasting big strokes and managed to grab hold of the skiff's rail, close to the stern. Then, for a jiffy , I hung on and fought for breath.}}

(computing) A unit of time defined by the frequency of its basic timer; historically, and by convention, 0.01 seconds, but some operating systems use other values.

(electronics) The length of an alternating current power cycle (1/60 or 1/50 of a second)

(physics) The time taken for light to travel one centimetre in a vacuum (sometimes one foot, or sometimes the width of a nucleon)