Happening or completed in an extremely short time, so fast that it seems to happen at once.
From Late Latin 'instantaneus' meaning 'immediate', from 'instans' (present, pressing). The English suffix '-ous' was added to form the adjective.
We call some things instantaneous, but physics reminds us that even ‘instant’ actions still take tiny slices of time. The word shows how human perception often compresses very fast events into a single mental moment.
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