shim
English · Thesaurus
AI In plain words
Writing a short explanation…
Written by a house AI from the entry below, in your language. The entry itself is the source.
shim¹
- /ʃɪm/
Rhymes with -ɪm
Where it comes from
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.
noun shims
- A wedge.
-
A thin piece of material, sometimes tapered, used for alignment or support.
Near-synonym: shimstock (uncountable)
Similar: shimstock
- 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.
- A kind of shallowly cutting plow used in tillage to break the ground and clear it of weeds.
-
A small metal device used to pick open a lock.
Similar: slim jim
-
A thin device inserted into a card reader by a criminal to facilitate fraud.
Similar: shimmer
verb shims · shimming · shimmed
- To fit one or more shims to a piece of machinery or other assembly; to adjust (something) by using shims.
- To adjust the homogeneity of a magnetic field (after the mechanical devices once used for the purpose).
- To intercept and modify calls to (an API), usually for compatibility purposes.
- To attack a point-of-sale card reader with a shim.
shim²
- /ʃɪm/
Rhymes with -ɪm
Where it comes from
Blend of she + him.
noun shims
-
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.
Similar: he-she
- 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."
SHIM³
noun
- Abbreviation of scanning helium ion microscope
Shim⁴
Where it comes from
Borrowed from Korean 심(沈) (Sim).
proper noun Shims · Sim
- A surname from Korean.
Translations
Every language
noun thin piece of material used for alignment or support
| Español | espaciador |
|---|---|
| Français | cale, cale d'épaisseur, espaceur, étai, thibaude |
| Deutsch | Unterlage, Abstandhalter, Abstandsblech, Unterlegscheibe, Zwischenstück, Klemmstück |
| Русский | регулировочная прокладка regulirovočnaja prokladka |
noun shallow plow used in tillage
| Français | sarcloir |
|---|
noun small metal device to pick a lock
| Deutsch | Dietrich |
|---|
noun transsexual person
| Deutsch | Transsexueller, Transsexuelle, Transe |
|---|
Talk about this word "shim." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/shim. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. shim. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/shim "shim." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/shim.Cite this
@misc{shim_2026,
title = {shim},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/shim},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
