A question of time

[andrewducker]

I said "Hang on ten seconds" to Sophia, which then had me wondering when the "second" became a common unit, and then going looking for other time keeping systems, discovering that both Sumeria and China had different time keeping divisions but ours is based on the Egyptian one, that the "second" is based on a "second of arc" because of sundials, and it wasn't measurable until the 1500s.

Which was a lovely excursion. The one thing I didn't find was when the second became a common term in discussion. When did people start saying "With you in a second"?

Comments

[rhythmaning]

My *guess* would be when watches became commonplace.

Isn't a "second" another way of saying "moment"?

"I'll be with you in a moment"?

[andrewducker]

They can be used fairly interchangeably in conversation. But my guess would be that "second" wasn't part of common language until they were visible to most people.

[rhythmaning]

That was my thinking behind suggesting when watches became common.

[andrewducker]

Makes sense to me.

[elf]

A "moment" used to be officially 1/40 of an hour, so a minute and a half. (Sundials had 40 sections before they had 60.)

[problemsdog]

It goes back to at least 1897. (The OED entry for this sense of "second" hasn't been revised yet, so this is information as of 1911, and once it's revised it will almost certainly go back further.)

"b. Used vaguely for an extremely short time, an ‘instant’.

1897 Daily News 14 June 5/7 There was a second's panic in the crowd.
1906 C. Mansfield Girl & Gods xii Do you mind if I slip away for just two seconds and take off this frock?"

[andrewducker]

Cheers!

How often do they revise it?

[problemsdog]

Once :) Or rather, half of once, so far.

The first edition was finished in 1928. There was a second in 1989, but really that was just amalgamating the various supplements into the main text, rather than changing what was there already.

Since 2000 the third edition has been underway, although it's the first time the text has actually been revised top-to-bottom. It's projected to finish in around 2037 (!). Meanwhile, revised entries are published in quarterly updates on oed.com, which has a note on each entry indicating its status.

Source: me. I worked on it for almost a decade, and my girlfriend still does!

[cmcmck]

Makes me wonder when watches first got to have second hands?

[reverancepavane]

We also use "hang on a tick," which I can't imagine preceded the advent of the mechanical clock. For much the same reason as "hang on a second," it being an audible representation of the smallest commonly used unit of time.