dt
dt is the most common shorthand for delta-time, which is usually passed through love.update to represent the amount of time which has passed since it was last called. It is in seconds, but because of the speed of modern processors is usually smaller than 1 (values like 0.01 is common).
Examples
Increase a variable x by 1 every second
x = 0
love.update(dt)
x = x + dt
end
