time

noun

Time — the continuum along which all experience moves and vanishes

Definition

The continuum of experience in which events pass from the future through the present to the past; "he waited for along time"; "it took some time before he got an answer"; "time flies like an arrow"

In depth

Time is the vast continuum through which events pass from future to present to past, the medium in which all change, growth, and decay unfold. It is one of the few concepts so fundamental that nearly every philosophical and scientific tradition has tried, and failed, to fully explain it, even as every living thing experiences its passage without exception.

Origin

The word descends from Old English tima, related to an ancient Germanic root concerned with division or extent, ultimately connected to a broader Indo-European stem meaning 'to stretch' or 'to extend.' That old sense of stretching survives in the modern word's deepest metaphor: time as something that extends, however invisibly, between one moment and the next.

Usage examples

"Time, the physicist admitted, behaves far more strangely at the smallest scales than ordinary experience would suggest."

"She measured the years not in time but in the slow changes of her children's faces."

"He had begun to feel that grief stopped time entirely, even as the calendar kept insisting otherwise."

How to use it

Time is among the most universally used words in the language, equally at home in physics, philosophy, and the most intimate personal reflection. Its sheer ubiquity means writers often achieve more by pairing it with precise, sensory detail than by invoking it in the abstract.