Other forms: glimmering, glimmers
To glimmer is to shine faintly and unsteadily. A light glimmered, glimmering in the dark, the glimmer of a candle.
The faintness and the wavering are both part of it: a glimmer is light at the edge of being seen. As a noun it is used constantly for the smallest possible amount of something good — a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of recognition — which is much the commoner use. Note glimmering; and that glimmer, gleam, glint and glisten all come from the same Germanic family.
1verbglimmerTo shine faintly and unsteadily.
“A single light glimmered in the window of the distant farmhouse.”
2nounsmallestThe smallest amount of something good.
“Not a glimmer of interest showed on the students' faces.”
glimmer is a faint light.
Middle English glimeren is glim plus -er, from a Germanic root about shining. Gleam, glint, glisten and glow come from the same family.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰley-
Middle English
glimeren
English, today
glimmer
Built from
From Middle English glimeren, glemeren (“to glimmer”), equivalent to glim + er. Cognate with German Low German glimmern (“to glimmer”), German glimmern (“to glimmer”), Danish glimre (“to glimmer”), Swedish glimra (“to glimmer”). a doublet of glimpse. Sense 5 was coined in the 2020s in analogy to trigger.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Ways of Looking