Where does short collide?

A short position is an exposure created by selling an asset the trader does not own, usually borrowed, in order to profit if its price falls and it can be bought back more cheaply. Joseph de la Vega's 1688 Confusión de confusiones, the earliest book on stock exchange dealing, already described traders on the Amsterdam exchange selling shares they did not hold in the expectation of a decline. Diamond and Verrecchia's 1987 Constraints on short-selling and asset price adjustment to private information gave the modern account of how limits on this practice affect the way prices absorb information. The referent is a financial position defined by owing an asset back to a lender, not an accidental path in a wire or a brief unit of speech.[1][2]

Unit

One position that owes a borrowed asset back to its lender, sized in shares or contracts

Recovery means

Closed, or covered, by repurchasing the asset and returning it to the lender

Measured by

Recorded as short interest, the number of shares sold short, and as the position's mark-to-market profit or loss

A short circuit is an unintended low-resistance path that lets current bypass the normal load, so a large fault current flows and can damage equipment or start a fire. Fortescue's 1918 Method of Symmetrical Co-Ordinates Applied to the Solution of Polyphase Networks gave the foundational technique still used to calculate the currents that flow during such faults in power systems. The referent is a physical fault in an electrical circuit, described by its fault current and clearing time, and it has nothing to do with a trading position or the length of a vowel beyond the shared word.[3]

Unit

One low-resistance fault path across a circuit, rated by the fault current it carries

Recovery means

Cleared by protective devices such as fuses or circuit breakers that interrupt the fault current

Measured by

Calculated and measured as prospective fault current in amperes and as the time taken to clear the fault

A short vowel or syllable is a speech unit of relatively brief duration, contrasted with a long one; the distinction organised the metre of ancient Greek and Latin verse and survives in the vowel-length contrasts of many living languages. Peterson and Lehiste's 1960 Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English measured these durations directly, timing spectrographically how long each vowel nucleus lasts in American English. The referent is the temporal length of a spoken unit, counted in milliseconds or in metrical positions, and it is unrelated to a borrowed-asset trade or an electrical fault.[4]

Unit

One vowel or syllable of brief duration, set against a long counterpart

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Timed acoustically in milliseconds, or classified by metrical position as short or long