shimmer

present singular third person shimmers · participle present shimmering · participle past shimmered · past shimmered

1. intransitiveTo 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

   3 more examples

   The shimmering glimpses of a stream

   1850, Alfred Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley, 3rd edition, London: Edward Moxon, Conclusion, p. 173

   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.

   1954, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1973, Book 2, Chapter 2, p. 339

   Pale tourists, tired but excited, emerge like apparitions from the heat haze that shimmers over the tarmac.

   2018, Tsitsi Dangarembga, chapter 22, in This Mournable Body, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press

   Synonyms: twinkle, sparkle, glisten, glimmer

2. 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.

plural shimmers

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

   He’d aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.

   2013, Rachel Kushner, chapter 16, in The Flamethrowers, New York: Vintage, published 2014, page 294

   2 more examples

   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.

   1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter X, in Jane Eyre. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 254

   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.

   1922, Katherine Anne Porter, “María Concepción”, in Flowering Judas and Other Stories, New York: The Modern Library, published 1940, page 6

   Synonyms: glimmer

2. computingA 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.

   2010, Daniel R. Boone, The Voice and Voice Therapy, Pearson College Division, →ISBN

plural shimmers

1. crimeA 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.

   Synonyms: shim