span

name

1. Acronym of Suicide Prevention Advocacy Network.
2. Acronym of Switched Port Analyzer, a Cisco technology.

noun

Etymology: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(s)pend-der. Proto-Germanic *spannō Old English spann Middle English spanne English span From Middle English spanne, from Old English spann, from Proto-Germanic *spannō (“span, handbreadth”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pend- (“to stretch”). Cognate with Dutch span, spanne, German Spanne. The sense “pair of horses” is probably from Old English ġespan, ġespann (“a joining; a fastening together; clasp; yoke”), from Proto-West Germanic [Term?]. Cognate with Dutch gespan, German Gespann.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. A small space or a brief portion of time.

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

   “"Why in ten thousand years scarce will the rain and storms lessen a mountain top by a span in thickness?"”

4. 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, […]”

5. 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.”

6. The length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports.
7. 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.
8. A pair of horses or other animals driven together; usually, such a pair of horses when similar in color, form, and action.
9. The space of all linear combinations of vectors within a set.
10. 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.”

11. wingspan of a plane or bird

verb

Etymology: From Middle English span, from Old English spann, from Proto-Germanic *spann, first and third person singular preterit indicative of Proto-Germanic *spinnaną (“to spin”).

1. simple past of spin

   “But when Adam delued, and Eue ſpan, VVho was then a Gentleman?”

   “So they went in to where Gudruda sat spinning in the hall, singing as she span.”