millisecond

noun

mil·​li·​sec·​ond ˈmi-lə-ˌse-kənd 

-kənt

: one thousandth of a second

Did you know?

A millisecond isn't long enough for the blink of an eye, but a few milliseconds may determine the winner of a swim race or a hundred-yard dash. With the ever-increasing speed of modern technology, even a millisecond has started to seem a little sluggish; computer operations are now measured in nanoseconds—that is, billionths of a second.

Examples of millisecond in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The platform recently launched its third-generation trading system, reducing order processing time from 20 milliseconds to just two milliseconds and handling up to 80,000 orders per second—a considerable achievement for a platform with trading volumes in the trillions. —Sean Lee, Forbes.com, 4 Apr. 2025

The overall click duration was only 48 milliseconds, the study said. —Megan Forrester, ABC News, 26 Mar. 2025

Hopkins' Hannibal appears in shockingly few scenes, but every millisecond of screen time is tattooed in scar tissue on pop culture. —EW.com, 2 Mar. 2025

With that setting on, latency drops to 2.2 milliseconds. —PCMAG, 19 Feb. 2025

Word History

Etymology

International Scientific Vocabulary

First Known Use

1909, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for millisecond

• femtosecond
• microsecond
• nanosecond
• picosecond
• beckoned
• reckoned
• second
• seconde

Kids Definition

millisecond

noun

mil·​li·​sec·​ond ˈmil-ə-ˌsek-ənd 

 also  -ənt

: one thousandth of a second

Medical Definition

millisecond

noun

mil·​li·​sec·​ond ˈmil-ə-ˌsek-ənd, -ənt 

: one thousandth of a second

—abbreviation ms, msec