22 October 2020
Sometimes the meaning of a technical term becomes more general when it moves into common discourse, but sometimes a general term acquires a more specialized meaning in the mouths of engineers and scientists. The latter is the case with glitch.
In English, glitch has the general meaning of a snag or malfunction of some sort. It is borrowed into English from either or both the German glitschen or the Yiddish glitshen, meaning to slip or slide. The earliest example I can find of the word in English is a 19 May 1940 syndicated newspaper column by Katherine Brush:
When the radio talkers make a little mistake in diction they call it a “fluff,” and when they make a bad one they call it a “glitch,” and I love it.
Brush is talking about mispronunciations and slips of the tongue, but the context is that of radio.
The radio context is important because the term develops a specialized electrical engineering sense. This sense is described by astronaut John Glenn in his 1962 book Into Orbit:
Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was “glitch.” Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit which takes place when the circuit suddenly has a new load put on it.
It’s possible that the specialized sense was earlier, and the radio announcers acquired the word from the engineers, but the evidence points in the other direction.
In any case, despite becoming familiar to the general public through the space program of the 1960s, use of glitch remained rare in general discourse until the 1980s, when the rise of personal computing and other home electronics made technical glitches a more common occurrence.
Sources:
Brush, Katherine. “Out of My Mind” (syndicated). Miami Herald, 19 May 1940, G2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. glitch, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. glitch, n.