Glitter

How to spell glitter

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce glitter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does glitter mean?

1. verbTo shine with a bright, sparkling, broken light.
2. nounTiny pieces of sparkling decorative material used in crafts and cosmetics.

Glitter in a sentence

• verb

  The frost made the pavement glitter in the morning sun.

• noun

  The children spread glitter all over the kitchen table during the craft session.

• verb

  Diamonds glitter under the bright lights of the jewellery counter.

• noun

  She brushed loose glitter from the greeting card before sealing the envelope.

Where does glitter come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Glitter traces back to the Old Norse verb 'glitra', meaning 'to shine' or 'to glisten', which travelled into northern England with Scandinavian settlers and surfaced in Middle English as 'gliteren' around the 1300s. It belongs to a large family of Germanic words beginning with 'gl-' that all suggest light and brightness, such as 'gleam', 'glisten', 'glow', and 'glance', a cluster so consistent that the 'gl-' opening itself came to feel like a hint of shining. The native Old English relative 'glitenian' carried the same sense, so the modern word sits at the meeting point of two close Germanic streams. The familiar noun, meaning tiny shiny decorative flecks, is much younger and grew out of the verb's idea of many small sparkling points of light. For spelling, the trap is the doubled 't': the frequentative '-er' ending is added to a short, stressed 'glit', so the consonant doubles just as it does in 'glimmer' and 'shimmer'.

How the word is built

• glit- (root meaning 'to shine, sparkle')
• -er (frequentative verb suffix denoting repeated action)