Glimmer

How to spell glimmer

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce glimmer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does glimmer mean?

1. nounA faint, wavering light, or a faint trace of a feeling or quality.
2. verbTo shine faintly or with a wavering, intermittent light.

Glimmer in a sentence

• noun

  A faint glimmer of candlelight showed under the door.

• verb

  Distant streetlights glimmer through the evening fog.

• noun

  After the meeting she felt a glimmer of hope about the new contract.

• verb

  The lake began to glimmer as the sun dipped behind the hills.

Where does glimmer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Glimmer comes from Middle English 'glimeren', meaning to shine faintly or unsteadily, and belongs to a wide family of Germanic words for shining that also gave us 'gleam', 'glint', 'glow', and 'glisten'. The base 'glim-' carried the sense of a weak or wavering light, and the ending '-er' is a frequentative, signalling something that happens again and again, so a glimmer is light that flickers rather than blazes steadily. The word surfaces in English writing from around the 14th century and kept its sense of soft, intermittent brightness. By the 1600s it had taken on the figurative meaning still common today, a faint trace of something hoped for, as in a glimmer of hope. The doubled 'm' is the main spelling point to remember: it sits between the short 'i' and the unstressed '-er' ending.

How the word is built

• glim- (Germanic root for shining, related to 'gleam')
• -er (frequentative suffix indicating a repeated or flickering action)