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duration

US/dəˈɹeɪ.ʃən/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,693 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: durations

Duration is how long something lasts from start to finish. The duration of the war, for the duration, short duration.

For the duration means until the end of whatever it is, and the phrase came into general use during the world wars, where it meant until the fighting stopped. In medicine and law it is the neutral technical word for length of time. Note that duration measures the stretch of time and length does not always — a long meeting and a meeting of long duration mean the same thing but sit at different registers.

Definitions of duration

  1. 1noundurationHow long something lasts from start to finish.B2

    “Please remain seated for the duration of the flight.”

duration is a length of time.

Also accepted in games: length

Where it comes from

Latin duratio comes from durare, to last or harden, from durus, hard. Endure, durable and during come from the same lasting, and during is literally a thing lasting.

  1. Medieval Latin

    dūrātiō

  2. Old French

    duracion

  3. Middle English

    duracioun

  4. English, today

    duration

From Middle English duracioun, from late Old French duracion, from Medieval Latin dūrātiō.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Time & Calendar

Practise this word

duration in the wild

  • The duration of a dah is three times the duration of a dit.

    Morse code

  • Each dit or dah within an encoded character is followed by a period of signal absence, called a space, equal to the dit duration.

    Morse code

  • An eighth note (American) or a quaver (British) is a musical note played for one eighth the duration of a whole note (semibreve).

    Eighth note

  • In music, duration is an amount of time or how long or short a note, phrase, section, or composition lasts.

    Duration (music)

  • Often duration is described according to terms borrowed from descriptions of pitch.

    Duration (music)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.