Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A minor malfunction, mishap, or technical problem; a snag.
  • noun A false or spurious electronic signal caused by a brief, unwanted surge of electric power.
  • noun Astronomy A sudden change in the period of rotation of a neutron star.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A fault or defect in a system, plan, or machine.
  • noun (Elect.) A brief surge or interruption in the voltage in an electrical circuit or device.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A problem affecting function; a bug; an imperfection; a quirk
  • noun video games A bug or an exploit.
  • noun music A genre of experimental electronic music of the 1990s, characterized by a deliberate use of sonic artifacts that would normally be viewed as unwanted noise.
  • verb To experience an intermittent, unexpected, malfunction
  • verb video games To perform an exploit or recreate a bug while playing a video game.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a fault or defect in a computer program, system, or machine

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably from Yiddish glitsh, a slip, lapse, from glitshn, to slip, from Middle High German glitschen, alteration of glīten, to glide, from Old High German glītan; see ghel- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Probably from Yiddish גליטש (glitsch), from dialectical German glitschig ("slippy"), from glitsch ("slide, glide, slip") + -ig ("-y"). Related to gleiten ("glide").

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  • of Yiddish extraction (see more here)

    April 23, 2009