shimmer
nounEtymology From Middle English schimeren, from Old English sċymrian, sċimrian, sċimerian, from Proto-Germanic *skimarōną. Cognate with Dutch schemeren, German schimmern.
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.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:
- 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:
1 more example
- 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
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences, Signal processing 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.2010, Daniel R. Boone, The Voice and Voice Therapy, Pearson College Division, →ISBN: