Glitches

How to spell glitches

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce glitches

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does glitches mean?

1. nounSudden, usually minor and temporary faults or malfunctions in a system, machine, or process.
2. verbSuffers a sudden, brief malfunction; behaves erratically for a short time.

Glitches in a sentence

• noun

  The software update fixed several annoying glitches in the login screen.

• verb

  The display sometimes glitches when the battery runs low.

• noun

  A few glitches during the broadcast were caused by a loose cable.

• verb

  The game glitches whenever too many players join at once.

Where does glitches come from?

Language of origin: Other

Glitch is a twentieth-century word that surfaced in American English around the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the worlds of radio broadcasting and, later, spaceflight, where engineers used it for a sudden, brief surge or fault in a system. The most widely accepted origin traces it to Yiddish glitsh, meaning 'a slippery place' or 'a slip', which is itself related to the German verb glitschen, 'to slip or slide'. The sense fits neatly: a glitch is a momentary slip in something that should run smoothly. Astronauts and mission controllers popularised the term in the 1960s, and from there it spread into computing, where it now names any small, often temporary fault. The plural simply adds -es because the word ends in -ch, and that same -es ending also forms the third-person verb, as in 'the screen glitches'.

How the word is built

• glitch (a sudden minor malfunction)
• -es (plural / third-person singular suffix)