glimpse

• glinse
• glimse (obsolete)

From earlier glimse, from Middle English glimsen (“to glisten, be dazzling, glance with the eyes”), akin to Middle High German glimsen (“to glow, smoulder”), Middle High German glinsen (“to shine, glimmer”), Middle Dutch glinsen and Middle Low German glinsen, glintzen, glinzen (“to shine, shimmer”), Dutch glinsteren (“to glitter, sparkle, shimmer, glint, glance”).

• IPA^(key): /ɡlɪmps/

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• Rhymes: -ɪmps

glimpse (plural glimpses)

1. A brief look, glance, or peek.

   I only got a glimpse of the car, so I can tell you the colour but not the registration number.

   • 1798, Samuel Rogers, An Epistle to a Friend

     Here hid by shrub-wood, there by glimpses seen.

   • 1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter I, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, OCLC 24962326:

     Selwyn, sitting up rumpled and cross-legged on the floor, after having boloed Drina to everybody's exquisite satisfaction, looked around at the sudden rustle of skirts to catch a glimpse of a vanishing figure—a glimmer of ruddy hair and the white curve of a youthful face, half-buried in a muff.

2. A sudden flash.
   • 1667, John Milton, “Book VI”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], […], OCLC 228722708; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, OCLC 230729554:

     Light as the lightning glimpse they ran.

3. A faint idea; an inkling.

glimpse (third-person singular simple present glimpses, present participle glimpsing, simple past and past participle glimpsed)

1. (transitive) To see or view briefly or incompletely.

   Synonyms: perceive, notice, detect, espy, spot, catch sight of

   I have only begun to glimpse the magnitude of the problem.

   • 1916, Florence Earle Coates, “Cendrillon”, in Poems, volume I:

     A hope that, glimpsed, must fade; / ⁠A form, illusion made, / That, vanishing, shall come no more again!

   • 1931, H. P. Lovecraft, chapter 8, in The Whisperer in Darkness:

     Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race—as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed.

2. (intransitive) To appear by glimpses.
   • 1596, Michael Drayton, Mortimeriados:

     Deformed Shaddowes glimpsing in his sight

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