span
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /spæn/
ipa: /spæːn/
rhymes: -æn
Forms: form: spans
Etymology: From Middle English spanne, from Old English spann, from Proto-Germanic *spannō (“span, handbreadth”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pend- (“to stretch”).
Cognate with Dutch span, spanne, German Spanne. The sense “pair of horses” is probably from Old English ġespan, ġespann (“a joining; a fastening together; clasp; yoke”), from Proto-West Germanic [Term?]. Cognate with Dutch gespan, German Gespann.
Senses: glosses: The full width of an open hand from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger used as an informal unit of length.
glosses: Any of various traditional units of length approximating this distance, especially the English handspan of 9 inches forming ⅛ fathom and equivalent to 22.86 cm.
examples: text: He has a short attention span and gets bored within minutes.
text: "Why in ten thousand years scarce will the rain and storms lessen a mountain top by a span in thickness?"
ref: 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:
text: Yet not to Earth's contracted Span,
Thy Goodneſs let me bound; […]
ref: 1738, [Alexander Pope], “Stanza VI”, in The Universal Prayer. […], London [actually Edinburgh]: […] [Thomas Ruddiman] for R[obert] Dodsley, […], →OCLC, page 5:
text: Life's but a span; I'll every inch enjoy.
ref: 1699, George Farquhar, The Constant Couple:
text: The unsilent present is a time of evaporating attention spans,
ref: 2007, John Zerzan, Silence:
glosses: A small space or a brief portion of time.
examples: text: For example, in OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Word, each span of text can have a style that defines key characteristics about the text: • What font it uses • Whether it's normal, bolded, italicized, […]
ref: 2004, Robert Harris, Robert Warner, The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace, page 759:
glosses: A portion of something by length; a subsequence.
examples: text: The force of the explosion demolished one pair of piers and two spans of the bridge crashed down into the river on top of the barges.
ref: 1961 January, “Talking of Trains: The Severn Bridge disaster”, in Trains Illustrated, page 5:
topics: architecture
business
construction
manufacturing
glosses: The spread or extent of an arch or between its abutments, or of a beam, girder, truss, roof, bridge, or the like, between supports.
topics: architecture
business
construction
manufacturing
glosses: The length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports.
topics: nautical
transport
glosses: A rope having its ends made fast so that a purchase can be hooked to the bight; also, a rope made fast in the center so that both ends can be used.
glosses: A pair of horses or other animals driven together; usually, such a pair of horses when similar in color, form, and action.
topics: mathematics
sciences
glosses: The space of all linear combinations of vectors within a set.
examples: text: We use the term span (also called depth, or dependence depth) to refer to the number of parallel steps assuming an unbounded number of processors.
ref: 2017, Ananya Kumar, Guy E. Blelloch, Robert Harper, “Parallel Functional Arrays”, in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, →DOI:
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: The time required to execute a parallel algorithm on an infinite number of processors, i.e. the shortest distance across a directed acyclic graph representing the computation steps.
glosses: wingspan of a plane or bird
Derived terms: word: arm span
word: attention span
word: clearspan
word: cospan
word: drawspan
word: endspan
word: eyespan
word: forspan
word: gerospan
word: handspan
word: healthspan
word: inspan
word: knot span
word: legspan
word: life span
word: lifespan
word: linear span
word: linkspan
word: long-span
word: mainspan
word: makespan
word: memory span
word: midspan
word: outspan
word: overspan
word: palmspan
word: span block
word: span counter
word: span iron
word: spanless
word: spannable
word: spanned → unspanned
word: spanner
word: spanning → multi-
word: overspanning
word: span of control
word: span roof
word: span shackle
word: spanwise
word: spanworm
english: spick and span
translation: spick and span
word: spick-and-span
word: subspan
word: supraspan
word: tetraspan
word: timespan
word: time-span reduction
word: widespan
word: wingspan
Related terms: word: spang
word: chord