| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| glitch |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  gl ch |
| NOUN: | 1. A minor malfunction, mishap, or technical problem; a snag: a computer glitch; a navigational glitch; a glitch in the negotiations. 2. A false or spurious electronic signal caused by a brief, unwanted surge of electric power. 3. Astronomy A sudden change in the period of rotation of a neutron star. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Probably from Yiddish glitsh, a slip, lapse, from glitshn, to slip, from Middle High German glitschen, alteration of gl ten, to glide, from Old High German gltan. See ghel-2 in Appendix I. | | OTHER FORMS: | glitch y —ADJECTIVE
| | WORD HISTORY: | Although glitch seems a word that people would always have found useful, it is first recorded in English in 1962 in the writing of John Glenn: “Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was ‘glitch.’ ” Glenn then gives the technical sense of the word the astronauts had adopted: “Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current.” It is easy to see why the astronauts, who were engaged in a highly technical endeavor, might have generalized a term from electronics to cover other technical problems. Since then glitch has passed beyond technical use and now covers a wide variety of malfunctions and mishaps.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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