in a flash

Idioms  

1. Also,. Quickly, immediately. For example, I'll be with you in a flash, or He said he'd be done in a jiffy, or I'll be off the phone in a second, or I felt a drop or two, and in a trice there was a downpour. The first idiom alludes to a flash of lightning and dates from about 1800. The word jiffy, meaning “a short time,” is of uncertain origin and dates from the late 1700s (as does the idiom using it); a second, literally one-sixtieth of a minute, has been used vaguely to mean “a very short time” since the early 1800s; and trice originally meant “a single pull at something” and has been used figuratively since the 1500s.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

in a flash

A year of explosive development in AI has caught up with frontier developers in a flash, who are now calling for a slowdown in the pace of research and the development of tighter oversight.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 14, 2026

He knows he will die in the coming months, but still feels physically fit — yet he lives with the knowledge that his condition can worsen in a flash.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 20, 2026

It was over in a flash, with half a dozen songs or so, meaning for the tens of thousands of campers here it was a literal case of if you snooze, you lose.

From BBC ● Jun. 15, 2026

But that illusion is impossible if all of space-time occurs in a flash.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 8, 2026

Then, in a flash, she grabbed it out of the air and squished it.

From "The Smartest Kid in the Universe" by Chris Grabenstein

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