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In a jiffy means very soon — in a moment, before you have time to fuss. It is informal and friendly, a little old-fashioned-cheerful, the sort of thing a parent or a says: “I’ll be there in a jiffy.” You can also say something will only take a jiffy, meaning a very short time. Nobody uses it in careful essays. The origin is unknown; people have said it was old thieves’ slang for lightning, and it was once spelled giffy, but that is a story, not a proof. A different, later use is the Jiffy bag, a envelope whose brand name became a generic word for that kind of packet.
一下子、立刻（口語，多用於 in a jiffy）
組成Origin unknown. Said to have been thieves’ cant for “lightning.” Formerly also written giffy; a link to gliff has been proposed, but that is only a guess. The envelope sense is a brand name, Jiffy bag, used as a common noun.
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
jiffynoun/ˈd͡ʒɪ.fi/
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A very short, unspecified length of time.
- I’ll be back in a jiffy.
- Most of the limbs of the law do every thing in a jiffy; but ask what they mean, and they would be as much puzzled, as if you required of them the explanantion of a common act of parliament.
- 2
computingengineeringmathematicsA unit of time defined by the frequency of its basic timer – historically, and by convention, 0.01 of a second, but some computer operating systems use other values.
- The FOR...NEXT loop for TIME increments by STEP 2 (every two jiffies) for two reasons: 1) the printing of 60 jiffies a second is too fast to read, and 2) the printing of each jiffy takes longer than its incrementations; this would delay the loop, so the printing of TIME$ is slower than it should be.
- The number of processed packets per round is limited in dependence of the page size. The processed packets are forwarded to a single queue and are processed for the time of two jiffies.
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businesselectrical-engineeringelectricityThe length of an alternating current power cycle (1/60 or 1/50 of a second).
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natural-sciencesphysical-sciencesphysicsThe time taken for light to travel a specified distance in a vacuum, usually one centimetre (approximately 33.3564 picoseconds), but sometimes one foot or the width of a nucleon.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。