''shim'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260817185222-00-⌔

shim - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

🖼️ ➺

Noun

shim (plural shims)

• A wedge.
• 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.¹
• (computing) 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.*²
• A kind of shallowly cutting plow used in tillage to break the ground and clear it of weeds.
  • ✤ Coordinate terms: cultivator, scuffler, grubber, scarifier
• A small metal device used to pick open a lock.
  • ✤ Synonym: slim jim
• (crime) A thin device inserted into a card reader by a criminal to facilitate fraud.
  • ✤ Synonym: shimmer

Verb

shim (third-person singular simple present shims, present participle shimming, simple past and past participle shimmed)

• (ambitransitive) To fit one or more shims to a piece of machinery or other assembly; to adjust (something) by using shims.
  • ✤ Hyponym: reshim
• To adjust the homogeneity of a magnetic field (after the mechanical devices once used for the purpose).
• (computing, transitive) To intercept and modify calls to (an API), usually for compatibility purposes.
• (ambitransitive) To attack a point-of-sale card reader with a shim.

Noun

shim (plural shims)

• (informal, often derogatory) A transsexual person, especially a trans woman; (loosely) a drag queen or transvestite.
  • ✤ Synonym: (derogatory) he-she
  • ✤ He — or “Shim” (she/him), as film director John Waters called the actor Divine — was as much a paradoxical as a perverse fellow.³
  • ✤ “We call him shim — short for ‘she-him.’⁴
  • ✤ Yes Maam, or Sir or just what/how do you address a shim?⁵
• (informal, often derogatory) 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.”⁶

Pronunciation

• IPA: /ʃɪm/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Rhymes: -ɪm

Etymology 1

Unknown; from Kent.⁷⁸ 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.

Etymology 2

Blend of she +‎ him.

Printed 2026-08-17.

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Footnotes

1. 2016 January 30, Jeff Howell, “Swinging doors: it’s not open and shut”, in The Daily Telegraph (Property), page 15: ↩

2. 2010, Russell Smith, Least Privilege Security for Windows 7, Vista and XP: ↩

3. 1998, The Seneca review, Hobart Student Association: ↩

4. 1995 May 30, The Advocate, page 11: ↩

5. 2004 July 26, grdog, “Wisdom of Great Leaders”, in alt.bitch.pork ‎${}^{[1]}$ (Usenet): ↩

6. 2009, Laurie Notaro, The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death: Reflections on Revenge, Germophobia, and Laser Hair Removal, Ballantine Books, →ISBN, page 89: ↩

7. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “shim”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩

8. “shim”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present. ↩