span
The full width of an open hand from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger used as an informal unit of length.
Other meanings
Any of various traditional units of length approximating this distance, especially the English handspan of 9 inches forming ⅛ fathom and equivalent to 22.86 cm.
A small space or a brief portion of time.
“He has a short attention span and gets bored within minutes.”
Word history
From Old English "spann".
Where this comes from
This definition is adapted from “span” on Wiktionary, by its contributors, published under CC BY-SA 4.0. This page is published under the same licence.