LATENCY • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Latency

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/lˈeɪtənsi/ Listen

noun

Latency n.

The state or quality of being latent. "To simplify the discussion, I shall distinguish three degrees of this latency."

The time between a stimulus the appearance of the response; the time between any causal action and the first appearance of the effect. Called also latent period.

Hence: (Med.) The time between exposure to a carcinogen or other disease-causing agent and the appearance of the consequent disease.

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Etymology of 'Latency'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Latency" Quotes from Famous Books

... property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change its own condition of rest or motion. In other words it is the negative quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or ...

— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... he called it; and faith and strength in that alone: latent thought and valor, content to lie latent, then burst out as in a blaze of heaven's lightning! Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer believed; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor, sceptical encyclopedias. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt, ...

— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... between surface soil and certain micro-organisms, and suggest that changes in the level of the subsoil water, to which Professor Max von Pettenkoffer long ago drew attention, may be a dominant factor in determining the latency or activity of pathogenic germs. But this is largely a matter of conjecture, and, so far as cholera is concerned, the conditions which turn an endemic into an epidemic disease must be ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... hereby mean to deny a certain degree of normal periodicity even to the human male; but such periodicity scarcely involves any element of sexual fear or attitude of sexual defence, in man because it is too slight to involve complete latency of the sexual functions, in other species because latency of sexual function in the male is always accompanied by corresponding latency ...

— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis