Have you ever gone outside on a clear, calm night, and enjoyed looking up at the stars as they…skinkled? Or, as in an 1888 newspaper story, maybe you’ve watched “A handful of flame which..merely skinkles on the window-panes.”
It’s true; in addition to twinkling, sparkling, gleaming, shimmering, flickering, glittering, winking, gleaming, scintillating, and corsuscating, objects that produce light subject to short-term dynamic and potentially chaotic variation in intensity and wavelength also skinkle.
It’s also true that “skinkle” is by far the most obscure of all those terms, and has appeared as recently as 1975’s “Grass skinkled, the frozen filaments snapping as they stepped.” (I’m not 100% sure the word is used correctly there…). “Skinkled” was a bit more common about a century or two ago. But it was never the sort of word that was in the forefront of everybody’s — or practically anybody’s — mind. Not only that, but the primary historical dictionary of English, the Oxford English Dictionary, didn’t think it was worth the time to look at very closely. They threw up their hands in defeat and the entry simply says “origin unclear.”
This isn’t the case with most of the other words used to describe visual vibration. “Coruscate” and “scintillate” come from the Latin words “coruscāre” and “scintillāre.” “Twinkle” and “gleam” come from Old English. “Sparkle” arrived in English from Dutch, in the 1400s. “Flicker” also comes from Old English, but it’s something of a comparison word; it’s like “flacker” but quicker. “Flacker,” by the way, is an obsolete word that meant the fluttering of birds’ wings; “flicker” originally just meant “fluttering faster.”
You could even imagine a bird outside a window that flackers, flickers, and “… skinkles on the window-panes.”
