span

Why in ten thousand years scarce will the rain and storms lessen a mountain top by a span in thickness?

He has a short attention span and gets bored within minutes.

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, […]

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.

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.