Sekirov Dictionary

span

/spæn/

noun 11
verb 7
forms 4
phrases 1

noun11

•
A small space or a brief portion of time.
- He has a short attention span and gets bored within minutes.
•
The spread or extent of an arch or between its abutments, or of a beam, girder, truss, roof, bridge, or the like, between supports.
- 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. — 1961
The length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports.
wingspan of a plane or bird
•
A portion of something by length; a subsequence.
- 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, […] — 2004
The space of all linear combinations of vectors within a set.
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.
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.
•
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.
- 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. — 2017
•
(US, Canada) A pair of horses or other animals driven or sold together; usually, such a pair of horses usually being similar in color, form, and action.
- A span of water buffalo, terrified out of their usual lethargy by sight of the plane, stampeded, pursued by a swearing and scarcely less terrified Hindu farmer. — 2022
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.

verb7

•
To extend across (a gap or space between two sides).
- The suspension bridge spanned the canyon.
•
To cover or extend over (an area or distance).
- The parking lot spans three acres.
- The forest spans the entire valley.
•
To extend through (a period of time).
- The novel spans three centuries.
- His career spanned five decades.
To generate an entire space by means of linear combinations.
•
To measure by the span of the hand with the fingers extended, or with the fingers encompassing the object.
- to span a space or distance; to span a cylinder
•
To fetter, as a horse; to hobble.
- We spanned the dogs high up a corrie to the south of the ridge […] — 1972
(US, old-fashioned) To be matched, as horses.

forms

spanned · spanning · spans · spannest

Phrases with span

spick-and-span
Clean, spotless.

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