glitch
/ɡlɪtʃ
/informal
noun
1A sudden, usually temporary malfunction or fault of equipment: a draft version was lost in a computer glitch...
- There concerns centre on ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticised for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning.
- The woman in the call centre told me that the letter had been sent out by accident - a computer glitch, she told me.
- However, the department has dismissed the issue as a temporary glitch and says the tagging of sheep will do a lot more for the credibility of the industry than farmers care to admit.
1.1An unexpected setback: the only glitch in his year is failing to qualify for the Masters...
- As your ruler Mercury goes retrograde, you could experience an unexpected glitch.
- The trick is to be prepared for all the unexpected glitches.
- I was the unexpected glitch in everyone's plan.
1.2 Astronomy A brief irregularity in the rotation of a pulsar.The laboratory demonstration is related to puzzling glitches observed by astronomers in the otherwise smooth, rapid rotation of pulsars....
- Notice that the lines of the flow-volume curve are free of glitches and irregularities.
verb [no object] chiefly US
Suffer a sudden malfunction or fault: the elevators glitched...
- The old combat system glitched frequently and simply wasn't capable of handling multiple contacts, limiting its usefulness in a hostile situation.
- On Saturday I went into work to find our server had glitched at some point between Friday night and Saturday morning, so I spent most of Saturday morning getting it back to the way it was.
- Then she noticed the DNA scanner and the primary security glitching as well, the other things that had been functional during the blast.
Origin
1960s (originally US): of unknown origin. The original sense was 'a sudden surge of current', hence 'malfunction, hitch' in astronautical slang.
Although nowadays a glitch can be any kind of hitch or snag, the word was originally used by US electronic engineers in the 1960s to mean ‘a sudden surge of electrical current’. Astronauts began using the word to talk about any sudden malfunction of equipment. It may derive from Yiddish glitsh ‘a slippery place’.