scintillate
/ˈsɪntɪleɪt
/verb [no object]
1Emit flashes of light; sparkle: the sleek boat seemed to scintillate with a dark blue light...
- Concerts are held here on summer evenings, with the room scintillating to the light of two thousand reflected candles.
- Walking in the night air along the Bosphorus where the city light scintillated on the water, I envied the dervishes their passion, their longing and their faith.
- He has proven himself a prodigious master of the qanun, an 81-string Arabic zither, his dexterous plucking unlocking the instrument's potential to scintillate and shine.
Synonyms
sparkle, shine, gleam, glitter, flash, shimmer, twinkle, glint, glisten, wink, blink
literary glister
rare coruscate, fulgurate, effulge, luminesce, phosphoresce, incandesce
1.1 Physics Fluoresce momentarily when struck by a charged particle or photon: a zinc sulphide screen scintillated when it was struck by an alpha particle...
- He was working on a method for identifying quasars through a discovery in the mid 1960s that quasars scintillate (fluctuate in detected intensity of their radio emissions) more than less compact radio sources.
Derivatives
scintillant
- But the flashes were more brilliant than the rainbow - purest blue, most delicate violet, brightest yellow, and all the intermediary shades, with the scintillant brilliancy of the diamond, dazzling, blinding, iridescent.
- Mine was a Bearded Silver Muskelunge of surpassing beauty and poignancy with mica-chip eyes and a hint of rakish scintillant teeth.
- Her dress was held up by a spaghetti strap tank-top and it was a scintillant shade of baby blue, falling a little above her knees.
Origin
Early 17th century: from Latin scintillat- 'sparkled', from the verb scintillare, from scintilla 'spark'.
tinsel from Late Middle English:
Sparkly tinsel comes from Latin scintilla ‘a spark’, which is also the source of scintillate (early 17th century). In medieval times tinsel was fabric woven with metallic thread or spangles—it became something like our familiar shiny strips in the late 16th century. The idea of glitter was picked up during the 1970s in Tinseltown, a nickname for Hollywood and its cinema.