Contextualizebeta

shim

noun
/ʃɪm/

Etymology

Unknown; from Kent. Originally a piece of iron attached to a plow; sense of “thin piece of wood” from 1723, sense of “thin piece of material used for alignment or support” from 1860.

  1. borrowed from ^심(沈)

Definitions

  1. A wedge.

  2. A thin piece of material, sometimes tapered, used for alignment or support.

    • Near-synonym: shimstock (uncountable)
    • The second adjustment [to a door that keeps swinging open] will require the screws to be loosened, and a shim or packing piece pushed behind the hinge to bring it into line.

  3. A small library that transparently intercepts and modifies calls to an API, usually for…

    A small library that transparently intercepts and modifies calls to an API, usually for compatibility purposes.

    • Shims intercept Win32 API calls from legacy applications, as defined by system administrators, and then modify the call before passing the code to Windows for execution.
  4. ›+ 11 more definitions

    1. A kind of shallowly cutting plow used in tillage to break the ground and clear it of…

      A kind of shallowly cutting plow used in tillage to break the ground and clear it of weeds.

    2. A small metal device used to pick open a lock.

    3. A thin device inserted into a card reader by a criminal to facilitate fraud.

    4. To fit one or more shims to a piece of machinery or other assembly

      To fit one or more shims to a piece of machinery or other assembly; to adjust (something) by using shims.

    5. To adjust the homogeneity of a magnetic field (after the mechanical devices once used for…

      To adjust the homogeneity of a magnetic field (after the mechanical devices once used for the purpose).

    6. To intercept and modify calls to (an API), usually for compatibility purposes.

    7. To attack a point-of-sale card reader with a shim.

    8. A transsexual person, especially a trans woman

      A transsexual person, especially a trans woman; (loosely) a drag queen or transvestite.

      • He — or "Shim" (she/him), as film director John Waters called the actor Divine — was as much a paradoxical as a perverse fellow.
      • "We call him shim— short for 'she-him.'
      • Yes Maam, or Sir or just what / how do you address a shim?

    9. A person characterised by both male and female traits, or by ambiguous male-female traits

      A person characterised by both male and female traits, or by ambiguous male-female traits; a hermaphrodite.

      • […] that I was a hermaphrodite, and that things would probably be getting much, much worse as other "parts" of me began to grow manly and I made the full transformation into a "shim."

    10. Abbreviation of scanning helium ion microscope.

    11. A surname.

The neighborhood

Derived

shimless, shimmable, shimmer, shimming

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for shim. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA