Definition of "mantissa" [man•tis•sa]

• The decimal part of a logarithm. In the logarithm 2.95424, the mantissa is 0.95424. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Even when the mantissa can be expressed with a single base-10 digit, like .4, it may not be the case in base 2."
• "-- The peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias who fought fatalism in his [Greek: Peri heimarmenês], at the beginning of the third century, and who violently attacked the charlatanism and cupidity of the astrologers in another book (_De anima mantissa_, p. 180, 14, Bruns), formulated the contradiction in the popular beliefs of his time (_ibid. _, p. 182, 18):"
• "The frexp intrinsic function has been updated to return a mantissa in the range of"