kV

Abbreviation with 2 meanings

kV
Stands forKilovolt
Meanings2
CategoriesUnits & Measurements, Technology & Computing
Also writtenKV

kV has two meanings. It stands for Kilovolt (engineering unit) or Key-value (store) (data & database).

Meanings of kV at a glance

#kV stands forContext
1KilovoltUnits & Measurements › Engineering Unit
2Key-value (store)Technology & Computing › Data & Database

1. Kilovolt

Units & Measurements · Engineering Unit Abbreviations

One thousand volts, used for power lines, substations and X-ray equipment. US transmission lines operate at roughly 115 to 765 kV, while local distribution lines typically run at about 4 to 35 kV.

Example: The new 345 kV transmission line will connect the wind farms to the grid.

Utilities transmit at high voltage because resistive losses fall with the square of current: doubling voltage halves the current and cuts losses by three quarters. China operates ultra-high-voltage lines at 1,000 kV AC and up to 1,100 kV DC. Medical X-ray tubes run at tens of kilovolts, written kVp for peak voltage.

2. Key-value (store) (KV)

Technology & Computing · Data & Database Abbreviations

A data model or database that stores values under unique keys and retrieves them by key, like a giant dictionary. Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, etcd and Cloudflare Workers KV are key-value stores used for caching, sessions and configuration.

Example: Cache the rendered page in the KV store with a five-minute expiry.

Simple lookups make key-value stores extremely fast and easy to scale out, but they offer little querying beyond the key. Amazon's 2007 Dynamo paper strongly influenced later distributed key-value databases. In large language models, the "KV cache" holds attention keys and values to speed up text generation, a different use of the same letters.

More engineering unit abbreviations

  • kPa – Kilopascal
  • kph – Kilometers per hour
  • ksi – Kilopounds per square inch
  • kt – Knot (aviation)
  • kVA – Kilovolt-ampere
  • kW – Kilowatt
  • kWh – Kilowatt-hour
  • kWp – Kilowatt-peak

See all 103 engineering unit abbreviations →

More data & database abbreviations

  • ETL – Extract, transform, load
  • FK – Foreign key
  • HDFS – Hadoop Distributed File System
  • JDBC – Java Database Connectivity
  • MDM – Master data management
  • MPP – Massively parallel processing
  • MSSQL – Microsoft SQL Server
  • MVCC – Multiversion concurrency control

See all 53 data & database abbreviations →

Edited by the AbbreviationList.com team. Spotted an error or a missing meaning? Contact us.