span – English noun declension

English noun forms of span

Noun: span
Singularspan
Pluralspans

Sample Sentences

  • 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?" [1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:]
  • Yet not to Earth's contracted Span,
  • Thy Goodneſs let me bound; […] [1738, [Alexander Pope], “Stanza VI”, in The Universal Prayer. […], London [actually Edinburgh]: […] [Thomas Ruddiman] for R[obert] Dodsley, […], →OCLC, page 5:]
  • Life's but a span; I'll every inch enjoy. [1699, George Farquhar, The Constant Couple:]
  • The unsilent present is a time of evaporating attention spans, [2007, John Zerzan, Silence:]
  • 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, […] [2004, Robert Harris, Robert Warner, The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace, page 759:]
  • 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. [1961 January, “Talking of Trains: The Severn Bridge disaster”, in Trains Illustrated, page 5:]
  • A span of water buffalo, terrified out of their usual lethargy by sight of the plane, stampeded, pursued by a swearing and scarcely less terrified Hindu farmer. [2022, Lester Bernard Dent, The Thousand-Headed Man: A Doc Savage Adventure, DigiCat:]
  • A span of goats harnessed to a cart is second only to ponies, in a child's estimation; therefore, the beginning of this lesson may well be a span of goats thus employed. [2016, Anna Botsford Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study, Ravenio Books:]
  • This was an action for a breach of warranty upon the sale of a span of horses. [1872, Marcus D. Hanover, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Horses, Embracing the Law of Bargain, Sale, and Warranty of Horses and Other Live Stock, R. Clarke & Company, page 111:]
  • When good oxen are worth 80 or 85 dollars a yoke, a span of horses at the same comparative rate of value will cost from $180 to $200. [1837 November 11, Franklin Farmer, volumes 1-2, F.D. Pettit, page 82:]
  • a span of horses costing two hundred dollars will last ten years, and then be worthless [1853, John Lauris Blake, The Farmer's Every-day Book, Or, Sketches of Social Life in the Country, Derby and Miller:]
  • Float, covered with pieces of woolen cloth from the mill, decorated with flags and bunting, drawn by a span of white horses and a span of black ones covered with white woolen blankets [1913 December, Nancy Darling, The Vermonter, volumes 18-19, Charles S. Forbes, page 258:]
  • 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. [2017, Ananya Kumar, Guy E. Blelloch, Robert Harper, “Parallel Functional Arrays”, in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, →DOI:]

Etymology

1. Etymology tree
2. Proto-Indo-European *(s)pend-der.
3. Proto-Germanic *spannō
4. Old English spann
5. Middle English spanne
6. English span
7. From Middle English spanne, from Old English spann, from Proto-Germanic *spannō (“span, handbreadth”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pend- (“to stretch”).
8. 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. See: Middle English Nouns 'spanne', Old English Nouns 'spann', Dutch Nouns 'span', German Nouns 'Spanne', Old English Nouns 'ġespan', Dutch Nouns 'gespan', German Nouns 'Gespann'.

Verbs referencing "span"

Swedish Nouns spann, Latvian Nouns spainis, Italian Nouns spanna, French Nouns empan, German Nouns Gespann.