shimmer

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a weak and tremulous light

   the shimmer of colors on iridescent feathers

2. 2
   verb

   shine with a weak or fitful light

   Beech leaves shimmered in the moonlight

3. 3
   verb

   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, With dusky shimmering wanny globe, her lampe doth pale appeare

4. 4
   noun

   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.

5. 5
   noun

   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.

6. 6
   verb

   give off a shimmering reflection, as of silk

7. 7
   verb

   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.

8. 8
   noun

   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.

Etymology

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