Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Continuance or persistence in time.
  • noun A period of existence or persistence.
  • noun The number of years required to receive the present value of future payments, both of interest and principle, of a bond, often used as an indicator of a bond's price volatility resulting from changes in interest rates.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Continuance in time; also, the length of time during which anything continues: as, the duration of life or of a partnership; the duration of a tone or note in music; the duration of an eclipse.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The state or quality of lasting; continuance in time; the portion of time during which anything exists.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An amount of time or a particular time interval
  • noun The time taken for the current situation to end, especially the current war
  • noun finance A measure of the sensitivity of the price of a financial asset to changes in interest rates, computed for a simple bond as a weighted average of the maturities of the interest and principal payments associated with it.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun continuance in time
  • noun the period of time during which something continues
  • noun the property of enduring or continuing in time

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English duracioun, from Old French duration, from Medieval Latin dūrātiō, dūrātiōn-, from Latin dūrātus, past participle of dūrāre, to last; see deuə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From dictionary.reference.com: 1350–1400; ME, from ML dūrātiōn- (s. of dūrātiō), equiv. to L dūrāt(us) (ptp. of dūrāre to last; see dure 2 ) + -iōn- -ion

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