A unit of electrical resistance equal to one billionth of an ohm, used in the centimeter-gram-second system of measurement.
From ab- (prefix meaning one-billionth in CGS units, from Latin ab- away) + ohm (unit of resistance named after Georg Ohm). A technical scientific term from early electrical measurement systems.
The 'ab-' prefix for billionths exists because physicists in the CGS system needed tiny units for measuring electrical resistance—today it's mostly obsolete because we switched to SI units, but 'abohm' survives in physics textbooks as a relic of competing measurement systems!
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