shimmer
English
editPronunciation
editEtymology 1
editFrom Middle English schimeren, from Old English sċymrian, sċimrian, sċimerian, from Proto-Germanic *skimarōną. Cognate with Dutch schemeren, German schimmern.
Verb
editshimmer (third-person singular simple present shimmers, present participle shimmering, simple past and past participle shimmered)
- (intransitive) To shine tremulously or intermittently; to gleam faintly.
- 1581, John Studley (translator), Medea, Act 4, in Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, London: Thomas Marsh, p. 135,[1]
- With dusky shimmering wanny globe, her lampe doth pale appeare
- 1850, Alfred Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley[2], 3rd edition, London: Edward Moxon, Conclusion, p. 173:
- The shimmering glimpses of a stream
- 1954, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring[3], New York: Ballantine Books, published 1973, Book 2, Chapter 2, p. 339:
- I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.
- 2018, Tsitsi Dangarembga, chapter 22, in This Mournable Body[4], Minneapolis: Graywolf Press:
- Pale tourists, tired but excited, emerge like apparitions from the heat haze that shimmers over the tarmac.
- 1581, John Studley (translator), Medea, Act 4, in Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, London: Thomas Marsh, p. 135,[1]
Derived terms
editTranslations
editto shine with a veiled light; to gleam faintly; to glisten; to glimmer
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Noun
editshimmer (plural shimmers)
- A faint or veiled and tremulous gleam or shining.
- Synonym: glimmer
- 1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter X, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 254:
- 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.
- 1922, Katherine Anne Porter, “María Concepción”, in Flowering Judas and Other Stories[5], New York: The Modern Library, published 1940, page 6:
- The hives […] were scattered towards the back of the clearing, like small mounds of clean vegetable refuse. Over each mound there hung a dusty golden shimmer of bees.
- 2013, Rachel Kushner, chapter 16, in The Flamethrowers[6], New York: Vintage, published 2014, page 294:
- He’d aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.
- (signal processing) A measure of the irregularities in the loudness of a particular pitch over time.
- Coordinate term: jitter
- 2010, Daniel R. Boone, The Voice and Voice Therapy, Pearson College Division, →ISBN:
- 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.
Translations
editfaint or veiled and tremulous gleam or shining; a glimmer
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Further reading
edit- “shimmer”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
- “shimmer”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
Etymology 2
editNoun
editshimmer (plural shimmers)
- (crime) 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.
Coordinate terms
editYola
editEtymology
editFrom Middle English schimeren, from Old English sċymrian, sċimrian, sċimerian.
Pronunciation
editVerb
editshimmer (present participle shimmereen)
- to glitter
References
edit- Jacob Poole (d. 1827) (before 1828) William Barnes, editor, A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, published 1867
Categories:
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- Rhymes:English/ɪmə(ɹ)
- Rhymes:English/ɪmə(ɹ)/2 syllables
- English terms inherited from Middle English
- English terms derived from Middle English
- English terms inherited from Old English
- English terms derived from Old English
- English terms inherited from Proto-Germanic
- English terms derived from Proto-Germanic
- English lemmas
- English verbs
- English intransitive verbs
- English terms with quotations
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- en:Signal processing
- English terms suffixed with -er
- en:Crime
- en:Light
- Yola terms inherited from Middle English
- Yola terms derived from Middle English
- Yola terms inherited from Old English
- Yola terms derived from Old English
- Yola terms with IPA pronunciation
- Yola lemmas
- Yola verbs