Cycle per second Cycle per second The cycle per second was a once-common English name for the unit of frequency now known as the hertz (Hz). The plural form was typically used, often written cycles per second, cycles/second, c.p.s., c/s, ~, or, ambiguously, just cycles. The term comes from the fact that sound waves have a frequency measurable in their number of oscillations, or "cycles", per second. With the organization of the International System of Units in 1960, the cycle per second was officially replaced by the hertz, or reciprocal second, "s" or "1/s". Symbolically, "cycle per second" units are "cycle/second", while hertz
Second second per second for acceleration, and per second for frequency. Although the historical definition of the unit was based on this division of the Earth's rotation cycle, the formal definition in the International System of Units (SI) is a much steadier timekeeper: 1 second is defined to be exactly "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" (at a temperature of 0 K). Because the Earth's rotation varies and is also slowing ever so slightly, a leap second is periodically added to clock