Other forms: glimpses, glimpsed, glimpsing
A glimpse is a look so short you are not quite sure what you saw. The fox at the end of the garden, gone before you turned your head properly.
It works as noun and verb, and the noun is far commoner: you catch a glimpse of something. Two things to hold on to — a glimpse is always brief, so a long glimpse is a contradiction, and it is usually accidental rather than chosen. It also works for things that are not visible at all: a glimpse of what her life had been like.
1nounglanceA very short look at something.~51%
“I caught a glimpse of him through the crowd.”
2verbglimpseTo see something for an instant.~4%
“She glimpsed the sea between two buildings.”
3nounbriefA brief understanding of something hidden.~45%
“The letters gave us a glimpse of what he was really like.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 118 sentences found in the wild and placed 96 of them on a sense (22 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
g-LIMP-se → a LIMP
You limp past a lit window and catch one second of what is inside before your bad leg carries you on.
hooks ontolimp
From Middle English glimsen, to shine faintly or glance — the same family as gleam and glimmer. A glimpse began as something the eye caught, the way it catches a flicker of light.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰley- — to shine
Proto-Germanic
*glimō
Proto-West Germanic
*glimmisōjan
Old English
*glimsian
Middle English
glimsen — to dazzle; to glisten; to glance with the eyes
English, today
glimpse
Built from
The verb is derived from earlier glimse obsolete, from Middle English glimsen (“to dazzle; to glisten; to glance with the eyes”), possibly from Old English glimsian, from Proto-West Germanic glimmisōjan, from Proto-Germanic glimō, from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰley- (“to shine”). a doublet of glimmer. The noun is derived from the verb. Dutch glimp (“glimpse”)
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA