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attention span

attention span

36 3.4
The time someone can focus on one thing without getting distracted
  • noun
  • /əˈtɛnʃən spæn/
translation icon : capacidad de atención
  • Many students struggle to maintain their attention span in long lectures.
  • short attention span
  • longer attention span
  • poor attention span

A lot of people talk about attention spans being shortened, right?

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Examples

  • As we have all seen, humans have very short attention spans, and there's just too much time between now and Christmas.

  • I have a really short attention span.

  • The industry has a very short attention span and a long memory.

  • You know how short my attention span is.

  • My sister's attention span is short, so I end up doing most of the work.

    Fiction book (1997)
  • It's like people talk about, you know, our attention span today being shorter than ever.

  • The short attention span of today's youth.

  • We find that as sleep debt increases, attention spans decrease.

  • As students grow and develop, their attention spans are greater, and they are able to absorb more in one lesson.

    Academic text (2014)
  • We live in a generation today where people's attention spans are just getting squashed.

Antonyms

234 2.9

Something that takes your attention away from what you are doing

Surface Forms

Morphology

attention + span

The meaning 'the length of time someone can concentrate' is directly and predictably composed from 'attention' (mental focus) and 'span' (an interval or length). This noun+noun combination follows a common compositional pattern found across languages, so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer the MWE's meaning.

Etymology

Attention span uses span in its old sense of 'a length or distance', giving a picture of how far or how long your attention can reach. So it means the length of time you can 'focus' on something before your mind moves on.