Meaning

• The space from the thumb to the end of the little finger when extended; nine inches; an eighth of a fathom.

• (by extension) A small space or a brief portion of time.

  "He has a short attention span and gets bored within minutes."

• A portion of something by length; a subsequence.

• 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 length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports.

• 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.

• A pair of horses or other animals driven together; usually, such a pair of horses when similar in color, form, and action.

• The space of all linear combinations of something.

• 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.