I’m doing something hard (for me) in July that I don’t want to talk about until August (in case I fail.) This something takes a lot of time, so I’m simplifying my July posts. I’m using a list of trivia that Aunt Patti emailed me. Each day, I will explore a trivia fact and bring you the truth, not just the clickbait. I might even rate the trivia. I think this will be fun because I love exploring new topics and sharing them with you. I hope you learn something too. If you do, why not share it with a friend. One of my goals is to get more readers, and word of mouth is a great way to do that. Many thanks, and on with the post.
Trivia: A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
This is partly true.
Informally, the word jiffy means a quick amount of time, but depending on the context, it can mean minutes or hours. If you say, “I’m going to the store, and I’ll be back in a jiffy,” you don’t mean less than a second. Time is relative.
However, in many formal measurement settings, a jiffy has a much shorter time duration, including, but not limited to, 1/100th of a second. Here is a list of how fast a jiffy is in various industries.
Jiffy Measurements
- In electronics, a jiffy is 1/60 or 1/50 of a second because it describes the period of an alternating current power cycle.
- In computing, a jiffy is variable. It is the time between two ticks of a system timer interrupt, which depends on the frequency. Usually, it is between 1 ms and 10 ms.
- In computer animation, a jiffy is 1/100th of a second and defines playback rate.
- In quantum physics and chemistry, a jiffy is the time it takes for light to travel one fermi or about 3 x 10−24 seconds.
Other definitions are even tinier, so your go-to-the-store jiffy doesn’t mean what you think it means. But it also may or may not mean 1/100 of a second, no matter what a dozen trivia bloggers say.
I give this trivia a 7 out of 10. The seven is for all the cool ways a jiffy is used, and zero is for the trivia itself.