Shimmer

//ˈʃɪm.ɚ// noun, verb

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A faint or veiled and tremulous gleam or shining.

    "I shut the closet, to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o’clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment."

  2. 2
    A thin electronic device that is fit inside a card reader, such as on automated teller machines (ATMs), or point-of-sale terminals (POS's), that acts as an intermediate interface between the chip on a chip-and-pin technology card and the chip reader of the machine, to allow one to clone the chip.
  3. 3
    a weak and tremulous light wordnet
  4. 4
    A measure of the irregularities in the loudness of a particular pitch over time.

    "As such, perturbation measures can only be derived from vowels, most accurately, sustained vowels or steady-state portions of vowels extracted from connected speech. Two commonly obtained perturbation measures are jitter and shimmer."

Verb
  1. 1
    To shine tremulously or intermittently; to gleam faintly. intransitive

    "1581, John Studley (translator), Medea, Act 4, in Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, London: Thomas Marsh, p. 135, With dusky shimmering wanny globe, her lampe doth pale appeare"

  2. 2
    give off a shimmering reflection, as of silk wordnet
  3. 3
    Of a mass of bees: to move their abdomens in a coordinated manner so as to produce a shimmering wave effect, thought to deter predators.
  4. 4
    shine with a weak or fitful light wordnet

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English schimeren, from Old English sċymrian, sċimrian, sċimerian, from Proto-Germanic *skimarōną. Cognate with Dutch schemeren, German schimmern.

Etymology 2

From Middle English schimeren, from Old English sċymrian, sċimrian, sċimerian, from Proto-Germanic *skimarōną. Cognate with Dutch schemeren, German schimmern.

Etymology 3

From shim + -er.

Next best steps

Mini challenge

Unscramble this word: shimmer