shimmer

verb

1. (intransitive)To shine tremulously or intermittently; to gleam faintly.

   “1581, John Studley (translator), Medea, Act 4, in Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, London: Thomas Marsh, p. 135, With dusky shimmering wanny globe, her lampe doth pale appeare”

   “The shimmering glimpses of a stream”

   “I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.”

   “Pale tourists, tired but excited, emerge like apparitions from the heat haze that shimmers over the tarmac.”

2. Of a mass of bees: to move their abdomens in a coordinated manner so as to produce a shimmering wave effect, thought to deter predators.

noun

1. A faint or veiled and tremulous gleam or shining.

   “I shut the closet, to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o’clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment.”

   “The hives […] were scattered towards the back of the clearing, like small mounds of clean vegetable refuse. Over each mound there hung a dusty golden shimmer of bees.”

   “He’d aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.”

2. A measure of the irregularities in the loudness of a particular pitch over time.

   “As such, perturbation measures can only be derived from vowels, most accurately, sustained vowels or steady-state portions of vowels extracted from connected speech. Two commonly obtained perturbation measures are jitter and shimmer.”

3. A thin electronic device that is fit inside a card reader, such as on automated teller machines (ATMs), or point-of-sale terminals (POS's), that acts as an intermediate interface between the chip on a chip-and-pin technology card and the chip reader of the machine, to allow one to clone the chip.