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light-year.

Noun
Sci-FiSettingTechnical
MEANING

The distance light travels through a vacuum in one Julian year, about 9.46 trillion kilometers.

Use it for

large interstellar separation; signal delay inferred from distance; distance distinguished from the age of a star or a travel duration

Words that belong together

  • a few light-years
  • a light-year distant

On the page

The signal had crossed several light-years before the receiver detected it.
A light-year of separation mattered even when the two sources looked adjacent in the sky.

Related words

lyinterstellar distance unitlight year (spelling variant)
Word forms
Base
light-year

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Science-fiction vocabulary

Usage notes

Primary category: sci-fi. Forms: Singular light-year; plural light-years. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.

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