fuse
A wick or cord used to convey flame to gunpowder, a bomb, or similar explosive.
Other meanings
An otherwise stable arbitrarily long repeating pattern that, when perturbed from one end, destructively carries that perturbation at a constant speed to the other end.
A tendency to lose one's temper.
“When talking about being laid off, he has a short fuse.”
Word history
From Latin "fūsus" (spindle).
Where this comes from
This definition is adapted from “fuse” on Wiktionary, by its contributors, published under CC BY-SA 4.0. This page is published under the same licence.