Definitions

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

  • noun A thin, often tapered piece of material, such as wood, stone, or metal, used to fill gaps, make something level, or adjust something to fit properly.
  • transitive verb To fill in, level, or adjust by using shims or a shim.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A white spot, as a white streak on a horse's face.
  • noun An ignis fatuus.
  • Same as shime.
  • noun Broadly, in machinery, a thin slip (usually of metal, but often of other material) used to fill up space caused by wear, or placed between parts liable to wear, as under the cap of a pillow-block or journal-box.
  • noun In stone-working and quarrying, a plate used to fill out the space at the side of a jumper-hole, between it and a wedge used for separating a block of stone, or for contracting the space in fitting a lewis into the hole.
  • noun A shim-plow (which see, under plow).
  • To wedge up or fill out to a fair surface by inserting a thin wedge or piece of material.
  • noun An imperfect shingle, thicker at one side than the other; also, an imperfect stave for a bucket.

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

  • noun A kind of shallow plow used in tillage to break the ground, and clear it of weeds.
  • noun (Mach.) A thin piece of metal placed between two parts to make a fit.

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

  • noun informal, often derogatory a person characterised by both male and female traits, or by ambiguous male-female traits, also called a he-she; transsexual.
  • noun informal, often derogatory hermaphrodite.
  • noun A wedge.
  • noun A thin piece of material, sometimes tapered, used for alignment or support.
  • noun computing A small library that transparently intercepts and modifies calls to an API, usually for compatibility purposes.
  • noun A kind of shallow plow used in tillage to break the ground and clear it of weeds.
  • noun A small metal device used to pick open a lock.
  • verb To fit one or more shims to a piece of machinery
  • verb To adjust something by using shims

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

  • noun a thin wedge of material (wood or metal or stone) for driving into crevices

Etymologies

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

[Origin unknown.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From she +‎ him.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

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.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word shim.

Examples

  • Marlene was already flipping through the _American Heritage Dictionary_ -- she had brought it in a plastic shopping bag because of my previous day's challenge of "shim" -- and she triumphantly told me, holding the fat volume in my face, that no such word was listed in it.

    Beard 2010

  • This is being fixed by adding a small piece of metal - called a "shim" - in a procedure that Toyota starts at dealerships in the UK on Wednesday.

    BBC - Ouch 2010

  • This is being fixed by adding a small piece of metal - called a "shim" - in a procedure that Toyota starts at dealerships in the UK on Wednesday.

    BBC - Ouch 2010

  • shim is just a barren, ovaryless freak of nature who maintains a dominatrix-to-trick relationship …

    Think Progress » Murtha on Haditha: ‘I Know There Was a Cover-up … The Chain of Command Tried to Stifle the Story’ 2006

  • The code for the shim, which is an HTML Web resource, looks like this:

    Site Home Jim Glass MSFT 2011

  • Toyota insists, though, that it has found the problem and the shim is the proper fix.

    SplicedFeed 2010

  • Toyota insists, though, that it has found the problem and the shim is the proper fix.

    SplicedFeed 2010

  • Toyota insists, though, that it has found the problem and the shim is the proper fix.

    SplicedFeed 2010

  • Toyota insists, though, that it has found the problem and the shim is the proper fix.

    SplicedFeed 2010

  • Toyota insists, though, that it has found the problem and the shim is the proper fix.

    SplicedFeed 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.