Jiffy
//ˈd͡ʒɪ.fi// noun, slang
noun, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A very short, unspecified length of time. colloquial
"I’ll be back in a jiffy."
- 2 Alternative form of Jiffy bag. alt-of, alternative
- 3 a very short time (as the time it takes the eye to blink or the heart to beat) wordnet
- 4 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."
- 5 The length of an alternating current power cycle (1/60 or 1/50 of a second).
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- 6 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.
- 7 Ellipsis of jiffy bag, a padded envelope. UK, abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I'll mail you the report in a jiffy, so you won't have to wait long."
Etymology
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.
Related phrases
More for "jiffy"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.