Glitch

How to spell glitch

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce glitch

What does glitch mean?

1. nounA sudden, usually minor and temporary fault in a machine, system, or plan.
2. verbTo suffer a sudden, brief malfunction or fault.

Glitch in a sentence

• noun

  A software glitch wiped half of the saved file.

• verb

  The screen will glitch for a second whenever the battery runs low.

• noun

  The payroll system had a glitch that delayed everyone's wages.

• verb

  The app tends to glitch when too many users log in at once.

Where does glitch come from?

Language of origin: Other

Glitch is a twentieth-century arrival whose roots almost certainly lie in Yiddish 'glitsh', meaning a slip or a slippery place, which itself goes back to the German verb 'glitschen', to slide or to slip. The literal image is of something sliding unexpectedly out of place, and that sense of a brief, unintended slip carried straight into the modern technical meaning. The word leapt into wide English use through American engineers and astronauts in the early 1960s, who used it for a sudden, often momentary fault in equipment or a power supply. From the space programme it spread to electronics, computing, and then to everyday speech for any small hitch. Because the word entered English fully formed as a compact cluster of consonants, there is no Latin or Greek scaffolding to reason from, which is exactly why the unusual 'tch' ending has to be memorised rather than worked out.

How the word is built

• glitch (single root, no prefix or suffix; an unanalysable borrowed stem)