epoch
Plural: epochs
Noun
- A distinct and significant period in history or a person's life.
- a period marked by distinctive character or reckoned from a fixed point or event
- (astronomy) an arbitrarily fixed date that is the point in time relative to which information (as coordinates of a celestial body) is recorded
- a unit of geological time that is a subdivision of a period and is itself divided into ages
- A particular period of history, or of a person's life, especially one considered noteworthy or remarkable.
- A notable event which marks the beginning of such a period.
- A specific instant in time, chosen as the point of reference or zero value of a system that involves identifying instants of time.
- A geochronologic unit of hundreds of thousands to millions of years; a subdivision of a period, and subdivided into ages (or sometimes subepochs).
- One complete presentation of the training data set to an iterative machine learning algorithm.
Verb
- To divide (data) into segments by time period.
Examples
- Landing EPOCH on a triple word score marked a new epoch in my Words With Friends strategy.
- The neural network was trained over 500 epochs.
- UNIX epoch; J2000 epoch
Origin / Etymology
From Medieval Latin epocha, from Ancient Greek ἐποχή (epokhḗ, “a check, cessation, stop, pause, epoch of a star, i.e., the point at which it seems to halt after reaching the highest, and generally the place of a star; hence, a historical epoch”), from ἐπέχω (epékhō, “I hold in, check”), from ἐπι- (epi-, “upon”) + ἔχω (ékhō, “I have, hold”). Doublet of epoche.
Synonyms
date of reference, era, age, generation
Scrabble Score: 12
epoch: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordepoch: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
epoch: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary